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"What are we?"
Chakotay paused his reading. "What?"
It was Gamma shift, off-duty for both of them, getting late. Kathryn was curled into his side on the large couch in her quarters. He'd suggested they turn the heat up but she'd declined in favor of her oversized blue turtleneck and making extensive use of his body heat. She repeated herself. "What are we?"
He blinked. "Us as in... all of us?" He swirled a finger in the air to indicate the entirety of the ship. "Or as in us?"
"That one. The two of us."
"Oh." He flicked a virtual bookmark into the text, turned off his pad, set it aside, and made a heroic effort to not react as though the red alert had just sounded. "...why?”
"I’m trying to decide, and your opinion seemed relevant?"
She raised her pad a moment so he could see the two columns of neat bullet-pointed handwriting down the sides. It was dense enough that at a glance all he could read were the columns' headers: ROMANCE and NOT.
“I can’t figure it out and it’s bothering me,” she explained.
He blinked. "This is very you, Kate."
"Thank you," she said.
"...what do you have so far?"
There was a brief pause. Janeway narrowed her eyes at the pad contemplatively. He hadn’t answered her question. She ignored the urge to write that down.
"Left first,” she said. “We are currently co-raising children."
“You can do that without being romantically involved.”
“You can do all of these without being romantically involved, Chakotay,” she said irritably. “That’s the problem.”
“Oh. Hmm. I guess it’s associated. But the kids have, what, eight people parenting them?”
“More or less, depending where you draw the line. And whatever I have with you, I don’t have it with Tom, or Keha, or Bip.”
He nodded slowly. “So…”
“Inconclusive. Next, cohabitation.”
Chakotay looked around sheepishly. “I do technically have my own quarters.”
“And the last time you slept in them was…” She counted in her head. “...nineteen days ago, and that was only because I was in quarantine after that business with the ether-spores.”
“Something like half the crew are cohabiting. Maquis do it a lot. It builds camaraderie.” The Maquis had started reconstructing the crew quarters about as soon as Engineering had convinced Janeway that it wouldn’t compromise hull integrity.
“Is that what we have, Chakotay?” She arched an eyebrow at him. “Camaraderie?”
He laughed. “Point made.”
“But you’re not wrong. Hence, ‘Inconclusive.’ Next up is physical intimacy.” Chakotay coughed, startled, and she allowed herself a smile where he couldn’t see it, her tail fan splaying and flattening with amusement. “What?” she asked innocently.
“Nothing,” he said. “Continue.”
“Get your head out of the recycling channel, Chakotay. We are currently being physically intimate.”
“...Oh.” He considered her weight against him, her warmth. It was fainter than a baseline human’s, but after this long she had stopped feeling oddly cold to him. It was just how Kate was, now. “That’s even less substantial than the others. There are plenty of nonromantic explanations for physical contact.”
“Well if you insist on something more dramatic, we can talk about the sex.” She didn’t look to see his expression so that he couldn’t see hers. It was much funnier when he had to guess whether she was doing it on purpose.
He recovered masterfully. “...that would be more substantial, yes. Neither of us are particularly… casual about that.”
"Well, yes, but it's not conclusive either, is it? Tom and B'Elanna were doing it for months before they started doing anything else."
He nodded. "And the three ensigns on the shields desk still haven't and I don't think they're planning on it."
"They're involved?"
"Yeah, long time now. You haven't noticed?"
She shrugged. "I only know about Tom and B'Elanna because she told me later. Had no idea at the time."
"Oh. So let me guess… inconclusive?"
“Exactly," she said. "That's Column A."
“So, a bunch of points in favor, but you could come up with a justification for any of them?”
“More or less,” she said. Something was nagging at her, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. What was Chakotay getting at?
“Huh,” he said. “...what about Column B?”
She filed a mental note and kept reading. “We haven’t been on any dates. Actually, I’m not sure about that one. There was the thing with the Bilgonians.”
Chakotay laughed. “Wait, the Bilgonians?”
“Yes. There was dinner and dancing.”
“Kate, you got high on cilantro and fought a psychic alien monster.”
“Defeated a psychic alien monster,” she corrected, dignity entirely intact. “Does that make it not count? Klingons consider demonstrating combat prowess to be an integral part of courtship.”
He raised his hands, defeated. “Sure. Call it another ‘maybe’. What’s next?”
She paused briefly. “The next point on the list is I am the captain and you are my first officer.”
Chakotay’s smile faded. “Oh.”
“It would be a gross breach of Starfleet protocol for me to become entangled with one of my subordinates.” Her tone was clinically flat.
Chakotay squeezed her shoulder gently. “I think we left Starfleet protocol behind a long time ago, Kate.”
She tightened. “I know. There’s a lot we’ve had to adapt here. But there’s reasons behind those rules, too.”
“What I mean is, it’s a bit late for reservations there, don’t you think? The protocols don’t care what we call it, we’re already over the line.”
“Don’t remind me,” she said quietly.
He turned her gently to face him and cupped her cheek. She lifted her hand and rested it against his, but didn’t meet his gaze. “Hey, Kate. I thought we worked through that a while back. B’Elanna told me she explained to you the Maquis way of handling things like this.”
“I remember. But I’m not Maquis, Chakotay. My crew aren’t either. We might not quite be Starfleet anymore, but we need to hold on to some parts of that.”
“You told us that we needed to keep what worked, and leave behind what didn’t. Do you remember? Way back at the beginning. Hold onto what made us strong, because we weren’t getting home otherwise.”
He brushed his thumb over her cheekbone. Her barbel twitched against his fingers. He continued. “I think this makes us stronger.”
She smiled sadly. “Starfleet command would disagree.”
“Funny. I haven’t heard them object yet.”
She snorted a laugh, nodded, and he let his hand fall away. “Besides,” he said, “if Tuvok were here, he’d point out that that one was an argument for why we shouldn’t be romantically involved, not why we aren’t. Sloppy logic.”
Janeway groaned, lying back along the couch and putting her hands over her face. Her tail swung up to thump heavily into Chakotay’s lap. “Do not bring Tuvok into this. Last time was bad enough.” She sighed, letting her hands drop, and stared at the ceiling. “But yes. Of course you’re right. I don’t know. I’m just looking for anything that might fall on either side, to tell me whether we are or aren’t, but everything I try is just… details. Behaviors. I try to dig through it and it all just falls apart into customs and rituals, nothing necessary, nothing sufficient… isn’t there supposed to be something underneath all that?”
“Like what?” He was still smiling from his joke about Tuvok, but his eyes held just the faintest hint of worry.
“Take your pick. Trust? Loyalty? Care? Respect?”
“We have those, don’t we?”
“Yes…” she said, watching him carefully, seeing his eyes widen slightly, then narrow, then dart sideways. She’d seen him in enough negotiations to know what it looked like when he realized he might have overstepped.
“...but I have them with my friends, too,” he said hurriedly. An about-face in the span of a single sentence. Her eyes narrowed minutely. “Just. More with you,” he finished, somewhat awkwardly.
“More with you too,” she said. She was sincere. She almost wished she could just focus on that sentiment, but she was hunting something. She pressed the point. “Shouldn’t it be… different, though? Not just more. Something that would differentiate it from just… very close friends.”
Chakotay considered the question. Janeway considered him. She was close. She turned up the dial another notch. “Very close friends who have sex sometimes.”
“Why do you need to know?” he burst out. “Why not just… let it be? I know it’s what you do, Kate, but… can’t we just let something be good without dissecting it for once?”
Kathryn’s eyebrows shot up, then slammed back down into a hard line. She’d found it. “Why don’t you want me to know?” she asked softly. She sat up sharply, her eyes flashing an eerie cyan in the soft light of the cabin, echoed in the spatter of blue-green dots along her cheeks.
“What?” Chakotay asked, genuinely confused and a bit taken aback.
“You didn’t answer my question. You don’t want to answer my question,” she said, leaning forward. “I asked what we were and you wouldn’t give me your opinion, and you’ve countered every single point I’ve raised. You’ve been in romantic relationships before. I haven’t. Between us I thought at least you would know, but you don’t want to tell me.”
“I…” he shifted on the couch, leaning away from her, eyes darting frantically.
“Tell me anyway!” she said. “Chakotay, in your expert opinion, is this romantic, or not? Yes or no?”
“It’s whatever you want it—”
“That’s not good enough,” she said, and was dimly surprised to feel how much heat was behind the sentiment. Her expression softened, her voice gentling. “Please, Chakotay. You can tell me.”
Chakotay leaned forward, broad shoulders hunching smaller. “I… I don’t know,” he said finally. “I genuinely don’t.” He stumbled over the words at first, but soon they started coming more smoothly, more surely. “From the start, with everything that was happening, we were too busy not dying for me to worry about that. And then after that, I just didn’t think it was an option—because of the captain thing, like you said, and also it just seemed that you… weren’t really interested in that, from what I could tell. With anyone.”
He laced his fingers together, resting them on her tail, which was still in his lap. He met her eyes again with a helpless shrug. “So this just kind of… happened. I figured you’d stop it wherever you were comfortable, so I was happy to be friends, then happier to be closer friends, and this, well, it happened one thing at a time. And you never stopped it. And I’m worried that one day, if it goes too far, or you look too close… you’re going to decide that whatever it is, you don’t want it anymore.”
He looked down and paused a moment before continuing, more quietly. “I meant it when I said it could be whatever you want it to be. When I think about it, about us, I don’t think I really care what the answer is, not for its own sake. I just don’t want it to be something you don’t like.”
She reached out, took his hand, squeezed mutely. Chakotay squeezed back. “Sorry I didn’t want to dig into it too much. The further we’ve gone, the more I’ve been… worried about rocking the boat.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Sorry for rocking it,” she said, and hesitated before she continued, putting her words in order. “I suppose I need to know because… I want to do this right, Chakotay. I care about this. About you. I want to do it on purpose. And I can’t do it justice unless I know. It is worthy of all the attention I can give it.”
He took her other hand and drew her closer until their foreheads pressed together. “I don’t know if it has a name,” he said softly. “Everyone I’ve been with, it’s been different, but this is something new. I don’t know what it is.”
“I don’t like not knowing,” she said. She didn’t like admitting it, but it was true, and he deserved to know. She felt the pulse of his heartbeat through his fingers, the warmth of his legs against hers, the slow rhythm of his breathing.
“I know you don’t,” he replied.
“I want to do it on purpose,” she repeated.
“Me too. Whatever it is we’re doing.”
She chuckled softly, felt his eyebrow twitch a question.
“To boldly go?” she asked.
He laughed. “To boldly go.”
She kissed him.
…
When they broke apart, he asked, “Do you want to do dates? We could do dates if you wanted to.”
She considered this briefly. “Eh.”
“Thank fuck,” he said. “We do not need another incident like the Bilgonians.”