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"You still there?"
Silence. No! A pause.
"Barely..."
His breath catches as he hears her voice through the crackling comms. Strained. She's in pain, he can tell, although if asked, she won't admit it.
He turns to Harry and sees him shake his head. It'll take time to get to her, time it doesn't sound like she has. Damn her! She shouldn't have been in that Jeffries tube. Then again, none of them have any business being here, in this particular place, at this particular time.
"We've got a team trying to get to you. Don't move!"
Another pause. A shuffling sound.
"I don't think I could if I wanted to. Too much debris. I think my leg–" Her voice breaks, and he grips the edges of the console, eyes screwed shut. "Never mind. I'm fine."
'Fine', her word for everything from ecstatic happiness to the agonies of being disemboweled by a targ. 'Fine', that word she wears like armour, because what else could she admit to being, if not fine?
"What's our status?"
There is, in his heart, the old anger, born of all the times he stood outside that door she'd bolted shut, and he wants to only say 'fine'. The sound of her breathing, jagged, irregular, stays him. She's impossible, infuriating, stubborn, but he isn't hearing any of this now. It's dissonance instead, a silence uncharacteristic of who she is, and he needs to keep her on the open comms channel, not give her an excuse to shut him out.
He circles down to the lower part of what's remained of the bridge, a PADD with still-incoming reports in one hand, vibrating with the dreaded arrival of each new message. His chair remains intact, although strewn with dust and shards of a console screen that had exploded close to it. He brushes it clean, then perches on the edge, elbows on his knees, head bent.
"No casualties. We're still in one piece. Reports are coming in, but..." He rattles it all off to her, waiting occasionally for her to chime in to make sure she's still there, listening. Time stretches into hours, but the chronometer at the top of the screen tells him it's been less than twenty minutes. He looks back at Harry, who is still shaking his head.
Breathing. A gasp. Crackling static. Then nothing.
"Stay with me, Kathryn. Stay on the line, please." He doesn't care who hears him call her by her first name, protocol be damned, as long as she stays with him.
"Tell me... tell me a story."
There's something in her voice, weaker than before, that worries him, but he pushes the image of her broken body out of his mind.
"Ancient legend?"
"Anything you want..."
She doesn't catch on. And that's how he knows: fine is the last thing she is.
-----
"You still there?"
His voice comes in through the cracks.
"Barely..."
The Jeffries tube is half collapsed. Her leg is caught above the knee, the other leg bent awkwardly under her. She can't quite see from this angle, lying on her back. A red-orange emergency light flickers behind, out of view. There is pain, but not as bad as it will soon be. The adrenaline keeps most of it at bay, coursing through her twitching fingers, making her take quick, uncontrolled breaths.
She can't remember why she was crawling through this section before the attack. Something about plasma distribution flow. B'Elanna's voice through the comms, they'd been discussing the adjustments. It's a blur. She shouldn't have been there. Or anywhere near this part of the galaxy, if she's being honest.
He's telling her to hold on. They're coming. Someone. Not him. She wants to make light of it. It falls flat. His priority's the crew, the ship. She's part of it, he'd say. She'd argue back. So she deflects. Never mind. She's fine, as always. Just fine.
Except she isn't. The pain is slowly starting to move up the leg she cannot see for the debris, and into her chest, throbbing. There is pressure in her lungs, and a strange coldness spreading from the tips of her fingers inward. Somewhere the hull has breached. She's losing air.
"What's our status?"
It's a genuine question, yet not. The reports should have started coming in, and she wants to know. Listening to him might stop her mind focusing on the dwindling oxygen supply. Or the pain.
Her head leans against the cold metal. The world is narrowing. It's uncomfortable. At least she's been pinned lying down. If she turns her head the emergency light hurts her eyes less. Slow breaths, in and out. Why is it so hard?
His voice comes through with the reports: engineering, sick-bay, bridge, no deaths, a few injuries. They still can't get to her. He doesn't say it, but she knows. She'd hear them. He's annoyed with her. She can hear that, and it makes her want to shake him. She manages an "okay", occasionally. To assure him she's still on the line. It's getting harder to talk.
It's also getting colder.
He cuts out, the line crackles with static, all she hears is him calling her by her name.
"–Kathryn–"
Then nothing.
She likes the way he says it, like he's asking for permission. She doesn't dare imagine what for. Her name is his to say as he pleases, as long as he talks to her.
"Tell me... tell me a story."
The cold is nearly unbearable. Her fingers clench and unclench, trying to hold it off, but that's getting harder too. Her breath comes in ragged bursts, ice in her lungs, almost worse than the mess her leg has become. It's all she can do to keep her teeth from chattering, to keep the resigned terror from her voice. It wouldn't help if he knew. He's probably guessed.
She's never really dwelt on how it might end. Her life. A few times it nearly did. One day, perhaps today, it will. This isn't what she had in mind, a collapsed Jeffries tube, far from home, so incredibly far from home. A book on her bedside table she'll never finish. Her unmade bed. It came too soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
It doesn't matter what he talks about, Tom's latest holo-novel or an in-depth description of one of Neelix's inedible stews. As long as she can hear him over the comms it will be fine. He's barely there, in the thinning air, amidst the ringing in her ears. Sound doesn't travel as it should.
"Anything you want..."
Silence. No! A pause, then his voice.
"This is the account of how all was in suspen-, all calm, in sil-ce; all moti-less, st-ll, and the expanse of the s-y was em-ty."
It's breaking apart.
The comms channel.
Her mind.
Either. Both.
Hypoxia's a bitch.
His voice. Keeping her tethered.
"There was noth- brought to-ther, noth-g wh-"
Comebackcomebackcomeback
"There was noth- stand-ng; only the c-lm wa-er, the pl-cid sea, al-ne and tran-il. Nothing existed–"
Breathebreathebreatheitwillbefine
Nothing existed.
-----
"...How should he offer it to Katharine? He looked quickly at her. He saw that she was only half attentive to him; only a section of her was exposed to him. The sight roused in him such desperation that he had much ado to control his impulse to rise and leave the house. Her hand lay loosely curled upon the table. He seized it and grasped it firmly as if to make sure of her existence and of his own..."
His hand lets go of hers, his voice falters before reading the next sentence. The open book feels heavy on his knees. He closes it, placing his thumb between the pages, needing the time to breathe.
He'd picked up the book on his way to sickbay, thinking the delay might make him look less eager to run to her side. He remembered having seen it the other night in her quarters, mint-green cover, woven ribbon sticking out between the pages. He thought she might enjoy having him read it to her. Or, perhaps, he admits to himself now, in lieu of him having to find his own words.
Lying on the biobed, her face is pale and drawn in the dim light, head tilted towards him. She's breathing softly, chest rising and falling underneath the blue medical gown. One arm over her stomach, the other by her side, she seems asleep, at peace. Her fingers are still shaped by the way they'd held his.
'Tell me a story', she'd asked. Then. He'd talked to her until the team cut through the debris, and found her. Half-frozen, one leg broken clean, the other crushed under a fallen crossbeam. Air leaking out through a micro-fissure in the hull not far. She'd been unconscious by then, but he'd kept talking through the comms. Ancient legends. Real ones. Well, older. Lucky, the Doctor had said. Too stubborn, more like it.
And now he's telling her another story in the deserted sickbay, sitting on an uncomfortable chair by her side, close enough to touch her. He couldn't bear to leave her. The thought of her waking to silence twisted something in him.
Her eyelids flutter for a second, fingers twitch lightly. Clench and unclench. Does she feel he's let go? Everything settles, her breathing evens out. He leans back against the chair.
The memory of the passage unsettles him, yet he opens the book again, half-pretending he's lost his place. The words he cannot say are there, on the right-hand page, under his thumb. "Because I love you, Katharine..." Different Katharine. And yet.
He keeps reading. Turns the page. It rustles in the stillness of the sickbay, only the Doctor's gentle, perfectly pitched whistling, flowing in from beyond the darkness of the office. The monitor above beeps an echo of her heartbeat.
More words he cannot say. Not to her, not out loud. Her name, not really hers, next to those particular words. They aren't his words, and yet, the thought of her hearing them makes his heart plummet through all the decks of the ship, out into the cold open space. Disintegrate.
Another pause. A pretence to miss his place and skip ahead, while he takes her cold hand in his again. Her fingers grasp at his. She sighs.
"It was true that he had been happier out in the street, thinking of her, than now that he was in the same room with her. He looked at her with a guilty expression on his face. But her look expressed neither disappointment nor reproach."
In the darkened sickbay, he wonders why she chose this book. Was it an old favourite? Had she read it before, like those slim volumes of Dante he keeps seeing her carrying around? It's a little twee, very Edwardian, all drawing rooms and love confessions and scandalised old aunts. It makes him think about Gretchen Janeway, what she'd make of him. Them.
It used to scare him, how often she'd slip into his mind. While filling in reports, boxing, waiting for the turbolift to arrive. She haunts his days, but also the quiet spaces when she is absent from his sight. A memory of a particular way she'd glanced at him on the bridge, leaning in, eyelashes fluttering, almost coquettishly. Or not? The brush of her fingertips over his, lingering longer than necessary to pass a PADD between them. There are times when he can't tell where she ends, and his fantasy of her begins.
And then, and then, whatever his mind throws at him in those moments between sleep and wakefulness. Her face flushed. The imagined sound of her breath, uniform unzipping under his hands, her body pressing into his. Against a bulkhead, over her desk, anywhere. It shames him, how his mind conjures her undone. As if she could bear being desired like this. She'd always been the one drawing not a line in the sand, easily erased, but a magic circle, burning fire, delineating what they can and cannot be to each other.
He pushes the thoughts from his mind the way he's pushed them away so often before. Her hand is in his, and his is in hers, and that is, perhaps, all she will ever allow. Some days it feels like it will be enough, merely being in her presence, talking to her, feeling her hand touch him, lightly, simply. Other days...
Something clatters in the lab at the back. A tray, metallic, the sound sharp yet muted by the distance. The Doctor calls out an apology, then continues humming, just as perfectly in tune as before. He wishes he'd miss a note, just one, because how can you sing Puccini like that, perfectly, the turmoil and pain, the moment that's fled? But he doesn't, and the aria ends. In the settling silence, he goes back to the book.
He keeps reading, meandering through endless tea parties and walks through a London he never knew, and never will. There's something in the book, the slow unravelling of characters he's only meeting now that their story is almost over, that seems to illuminate something about her he had never grasped before. Not Katharine, but his Kathryn. How still she would sit after their dinners, as if moving at all would betray something about her that was unspeakable, yet is now almost clear.
His Kathryn.
His.
She isn't really anyone's.
-----
The bookmark is in the wrong place.
Her fingers run over it. Chapter 32.
She's half-lying on the couch, curled against the cushions, blanket over her legs and feet. She's wearing a green dress she can't remember wearing in a while, soft under the blanket. The constrained cut of the uniform, the roughness of the undershirt, is the opposite of what she needed when she woke up, shockingly late, in the mid-morning. A robe felt too revealing in case anyone came by to check on her. But she had wanted some sort of metaphorical comfort garment, and the dress soothes her. It's like memory against her skin, and if she closes her eyes she can almost feel the smell of trees and sunshine. Of earth. From before.
There's an echo of pain above her knee, a small muscle twitching, when she puts weight on the leg. A reminder. A pull. Normally, she'd be on the bridge now, regardless. In the Ready Room. Engineering. Anywhere else but here. Alpha shift is nearly over.
She lets the book sit in her lap, still open, and reaches for the tea on the side table. A tisane really, no caffeine for a few days. It's cold. The honey she added but forgot about had settled at the bottom. A dark gooey patch clings to the mug, then the spoon as she stirs it in, all too late.
Chapter 32.
She puts it back. The tea. It's ruined. And she's too tired, too empty, too blah, to go get another one. This isn't her. Not really. Blankets, cushions, and that stack of PADDs she hasn't had the heart to touch. The book had been a bust as well. Not the book itself, but something about it. The misplaced bookmark, the way the pages fell open, the words staring back.
It's easier looking out the viewport, at the streaks of stars passing by. Head leaning against her hand. Numbly. In silence. For hours. More stars.
The past two days are a blur. She remembers the attack, some of the aftermath. The collapsed Jeffries tube and the cold. A story about the sky and the sea, biblical, yet not quite. Nothingness. Slipping into it, gently, gently. Chakotay's voice, fragmented yet warm, pulling her back from the brink again and again.
The other times when she thought she might die she could fight it. There was something to do, someone to confront. This time, all she could do was wait. To freeze, bleed out. The air to slowly syphon off into the darkness of space. Just wait. In the silence. Helpless. Alone. Lulled by the sound of his voice into a dreamless sleep. It unnerves her.
The book feels heavy in her lap. Real. Or, rather, old. The pages thick, roughly cut, the cover cloth-bound, edges fraying a little. Mark had bought it. 'Not a gift', he'd said. 'More like a find.' He'd thought she'd think it amusing, considering. He hadn't said at the time considering what, and she hadn't asked, drowning as she had been at the time in schematics, and dreams of a ship still being built. Her ship. Had she asked, she might have understood something about him. Them. Or not. Everything's shifted, who she is now can barely remember who she had been then. His? No one's? It hardly matters anymore.
They'd been in love. Happy, even, or so she'd thought. He was kind. A good cook. Molly liked him. Yet there was always a thin, translucent but ever present veil between them that stayed her each time she thought she might reveal something about who she truly was.
He was so content among his books, the voices of people long gone; bringing in her cold pragmatism had felt like an intrusion. Weren't her stars the same ones that inspired Ptolemy and Poincaré? And Kant, with his starry heavens and moral law? Surely they had been fated all along. Surely.
And yet, she could talk to him about science, but not the uniform. Not the weight of it. And that was just as much part of who she was as everything else. The way she had to live with giving an order knowing full well what the repercussions would be. The memories of war, bodies shred to pieces. He'd try to justify her pain. Reason his way around her guilt. Out of kindness, out of love. But it had to be faced, hadn't it? Head on! It couldn't be debated. Argued with.
She hasn't felt like reading the book until his letter. She'd brought it along, a strange outlier among her own volumes, and it waited for years, touched only to be placed back on its shelf after one battle or another. Dante had always been hers, long before him, his gift of it to her had said more about his willingness to meet her halfway than anything else. This though, this, had been his choice, for her. How he must have seen her. And since she cannot ask anymore, her only way to understand was to read it. She was less than a quarter through when she realised what he'd meant all those years ago. ‘Considering!’ Yes — yes. Considering. That veil she let settle between them must have not been as invisible to him as she had thought, although, he seemed to mind it less than she did.
"Chakotay to Janeway!"
The voice, his voice, brings her out of the reverie. She replies too quickly, eagerly, almost.
"Go ahead Commander!"
There's a hesitation, a pause she can almost feel, like static, even though the channel is clear, communications restored along with the rest of the systems since the previous evening.
"Just checking in. Are you awake?"
She chuckles, her fingers drumming lightly against the pages of the book. It's cute, almost, the way he asks. When she woke up yesterday in sickbay he'd been there, head dropped to his chest, dozing on an uncomfortable looking chair. When she called his name, he'd flinched, and asked her if she was awake, as if he hadn't been the one fast asleep. He must have sat there the whole night.
"It's the middle of the afternoon," she says eventually, trying to match his tone.
"Right. I thought maybe–"
"Yes...?"
Another pause she can't quite place. She can tell he's somewhere public, the bridge, the mess hall, or he'd have used her first name. In that way of his. The way that sounds like warm honey dripping into a hollow in her chest.
"Would you care for some company?"
There it is, the thing he wanted. And, if she's honest, the thing she needed. Brooding alone in her quarters hadn't helped. Not even under the guise of recuperating. Not even if her leg, the one that had been mangled, still hurt.
He's easy to be with. There is no need for her to pretend, to be one thing or another, hide her less charitable impulses, or soothe his ego. Even when she lies to him, he knows, and he'll take it without needing to fix her. Argue with her, yes, but not alter who she is. Over the years they've shared everything, and it shocks her, although it isn't the first time she'd thought of it, that she's spent more time with him than she ever had with anyone else.
"Always!"
The door chimes before he closes the channel.
He'd been outside all along.
-----
He recognises the cut and colour of the dress the moment he enters her quarters.
The green one. The one he'd told her once he liked, over cocoa outside a grey shelter. It still suits her, two years later – the low cut of it, the way it exposes her neck and the soft dell beneath her throat. He still wants to kiss her there, taste the warmth of the skin, but what grips him now feels closer to fear than lust, seeing her under a blanket, leaning against the cushions of the couch. Like a convalescing Edwardian lady, pale cheeks and quiet grace. It had gotten to him, that book. He'd been thinking about it.
"Have you been taking care of my ship?"
She tilts her head as she asks, and motions him to sit. The armchair feels too far, and somehow, at the wrong angle. She tucks her feet in, drawing the blanket close. She'd probably picked up on his confusion, the way his eyes had moved between her and the chair. He sits in the shared space, on the couch, a little sideways, one leg under him, arm over the backrest, to face her more easily. She keeps rearranging the blanket.
"Spick and span. Reports will be on your desk first thing tomorrow morning. If you're up for it."
He's giving her an out, if she wants it, but she looks away. He suspects the still healing leg was an excuse on the Doctor's part to get her to slow down for a few days. Breathe. But she was never one for slow. At least the pile of PADDs on her side table seems untouched. There's a book in her lap.
That book.
The one neither have finished. He'd put it back on her bedside table the other day, where he'd found it, before she'd been discharged.
He remembers the feel of the cloth under his fingers, the cold sickbay lights turning the off-white of the pages an almost sickly yellow. His terror, earlier. At the thought of losing her. Her cold hands. He'd left the bookmark in the wrong place, he realises as he watches her twirl the ribbon around her index finger, absent-mindedly.
"I forgot to put the bookmark back in its place. Chapter 30, was it?"
He looks up from her hands. Her eyes are narrow, confused. Dark-grey in the subdued light instead of their usual blue. She hasn’t said anything since she’d asked him about the ship.
"I remembered seeing it here when we had dinner, so I brought it to sickbay. To read it to you. I thought it might help. To hear something. Stories."
She tilts her head, the way she always does. Smiles. Halfway, then fully, in that way she does sometimes.
"I did wonder about that..." she says trailing off, and he shrugs. As if it had meant nothing, when it nearly undid him to see her so broken.
He realises she'll read those chapters at some point. Perhaps, knowing he'd read them out loud, in the dark silence of the sickbay, think about what he must have said to her. Would it have mattered that the words weren't really his? People have been saying them, the same ones, for millennia. Someone, many many someones, are probably saying them right now, in myriads of languages. Not him, though.
And, perhaps, never them.
He looks at the mug on the table, still full, spoon sticking out.
"Can I get you a fresh one?"
She nods, softly. "Yes, please."
There is honey in the mug, he notices as he picks it up to recycle. He'll get her a small pot, maybe a cup of tea for himself as well, there should be enough rations left.
"That story you've told me, over comms. The one about the sea and sky. What was it?
Her voice is a little off, a little like it had been over that broken comm line, but she's whole and healthy now, so he turns away from the replicator to look at her, trying to gauge what she means before he remembers.
"A Mayan creation myth. An ancient legend, if you will."
"It's beautiful," she says, looking away, at the stars outside. He picks up the honey from the replicator, the mugs in his other hand, back of his fingers flush against their hot sides as he grips the handles together. It doesn't seem to hurt. She leans in to take one of them from his hands, and wraps her fingers around it.
She seems wistful, drawn so sharply against the darkness outside, her short hair framing her face. This time she must have willingly ignored his choice of words. Perhaps he's reading too much into everything she says. Or not enough.
"Very beautiful," he says, sitting down by her feet again, one hand stirring in the honey with slow movements, watching her do the same. "The myth," he clarifies quickly.
"Thank you! For that. And sickbay..."
One hand reaches out towards him, and he takes it. The warmth of her fingers, borrowed from the mug, the way they squeeze his ever so gently, tears at him. He shrugs again, half-pretending he'd lost his place reading his own heart. Skipped over the words he most wanted to say.
"I thought I lost you."
She doesn't reply. Just lifts a brow, then lets their joined hands settle, quietly, onto the blanket.
"We couldn't get to you. I didn't know what to say. Do."
"You did what I asked. You told me a story."
Her head is slightly bent, her other hand holding the mug of tea close to her chest, and it's unbearable, being so near to her, in the half-darkness of the room, amidst the soft smell of the tea and honey. She squeezes his fingers in hers, and he hopes she never lets go. Or never touches him again, not unless she means it, not unless she is willing to break her fiery circle.
"Fitting, don't you think? Dying while listening to a creation myth?" she smiles at him, making light in that way of hers. In that way that deflects. It wells up, for a second, the familiar anger, but he pushes it away. It's easier to dismiss when she's so close, her skin against his, however chastely.
"In lieu of a proper old-fashioned burial service, you mean?" he tries to answer her levity the best he can, but they're slowly slipping into gallows humour.
It feels, at times, as if they're walking side by side with death. Not just of people, but dreams, futures. He thinks back to Sveta, her news of the Maquis. Kathryn's dream of marriage. Would she have ever done anything so prosaic, so mundane, as getting married?
His only context for the story had been the fact that Kathryn had been reading it. Her namesake had been engaged to someone else as well, in the book. Someone who, like Mark, hadn't married her after all. The man she loved instead had haunted the streets of London holding on to an image of a perfect Katharine, asking for nothing. It seemed.
Kathryn... He wants to say her name against the hollow under her throat, framed so perfectly by the collar of her dress. Kathryn...
"It anchored me," she says, and moves her fingers to lace through his, then leans slightly towards him, over the tea and the blanket covering her legs. "Your story. Your voice..."
The book slips from her lap, hits the floor with a soft thud.
He glances at their hands, then up at her, at that little dip between her collarbones, her pulse throbbing ever so softly under the pale skin of her throat. He swallows, then places the mug of tea he's only half-finished on the table, and picks up the book, fingers clenching around it to stop himself from crushing hers.
"I–" he wants to say it so badly. He owns how selfish it is, how unfair, yet it feels like one of those moments when she would perhaps forgive it.
"Yes?" she raises an eyebrow, her face close to his, too close for who they are, what they are.
It’s always like that, with her. A momentary pull, like a tide, a glance held too long, her eyes searching his, when he thinks they might… something… nothing. Nothing. And yet she must know, after all these years, still. Still. Probably always.
"You know."
"Do I?"
"I think you do."
She leans back against the cushions and lets go of his hand, drawing hers back to cradle the mug of tea. Her face turns from his, eyebrows knit, a gentle pull at the corner of her mouth as he watches her profile stark against the darkness once more.
"Would you mind reading to me again?" she asks suddenly, eyes still averted.
He nods, tugging at the ribbon to open the book.
-----
Has he always been this tall?
They're standing by the door inside her quarters, an echo of evenings past.
She's barefoot, the carpet rough against her toes. He's holding the jacket of his uniform in one hand, knuckles white. He'd taken it off to make dinner. A broth, clear yet rich. He brought it to her on the couch, recycled the mugs of tea and the empty honey pot. Fussed, as if she had been one of those insufferable Edwardian invalids. She let him.
What he'd said but didn't circles in her mind. She'd wanted him to talk to her. He'd read out loud, instead, for hours, until they'd exhausted all the words neither of them could say. She'd asked him to, just to keep him there, with her.
And now, with the book finished, she realises it could never have been Mark's. Not really. It's Chakotay’s now. His book. His words. His Katharine.
His Kathryn.
His.
For the briefest of moments she allows herself to imagine an endless stretch of days, and nights, when they're not standing in front of her door. When he doesn't leave. Something bitter-sweet twists and coils around her heart, and she understands why he hasn't said it: as long as he doesn't ask, she cannot say no.
They'll linger.
And perhaps that's enough.
He moves to the door and she grabs his hand, fingers lacing lightly through his. He looks down at their clasped hands, and smiles.
For a moment they wait, and then loosen their hands.
"Good night," he breathes.
"Good night," she murmurs back to him.