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Everybody meets for breakfast in the spacious dining room where remnants of the previous evening’s celebrations—a piece of colorful ribbon here, a ‘Welcome HomeVoyager!’ plaque there—still cling to the corners. Tom is resting his head on folded arms, groaning softly, while B’Elanna nurses Miral with a look of moral superiority on her face; Harry is talking to a girl working at HQ whom he’d met at the party (judging by the creases on her blouse, she’s never left the building since), carefully observed by Seven, the Doctor hovering over her shoulder, whispering offhand comments. Tuvok, naturally, isn’t with them—he’d been shipped to Vulcan straight from Jupiter Station. Chakotay has just joined the group, carrying a heavily laden tray of salads, pouched eggs, bacon, French toast and coffee: he places it on the table between their two seats and sits down, throwing an arm across the back of Kathryn’s chair. He’s clean shaven, smells of new cologne, and looks completely at ease.
Which is the opposite of what Kathryn’s feeling at this particular moment.
His thumb brushes her back between her shoulder-blades, and she almost jumps out of her skin. “Earth to Kathryn,” he speaks close to her ear, and she bites her lip.
“Kathryn,” he repeats her name, his speech slightly slurred, and reaches up to cradle her face in his hands. She turns and nuzzles at his palm, by this point only half-aware of what’s going on around them, and why—if at all—this is a bad idea.
“Come here,” she says instead, and pulls him down, down, down.
“You really should try and eat something,” Chakotay goes on, completely oblivious to the havoc he’s wreaking on her composure. “Did you actually have something besides the champagne last night?”
He tastes of golden bubbles, somehow, and it’s so much better than the actual drink she’s not sure she could ever stop kissing him now once she’s tried it. She curls her tongue around his and smirks against his mouth at the resulting moan: only to make the sound herself as his hand travels up her ribcage, fingers nimble despite the intoxication exploring her through the sheer fabric of her dress…
“Kathryn?”
Her first instinct is to snap at him—he’s no longer her first officer, why does he care about what she eats?—but they’ve only managed to somewhat mend their friendship last night, and she doesn’t want to let all that go to waste. She should make a joke at this point, call him a mother hen or something adequately absurd, share the carefully assembled breakfast with him, make a promise to call in a few days after she’s settled in Indiana; perhaps brave a chaste kiss to his cheek when they say goodbye a few hours from now.
She cannot bring herself to do any of those things.
It’s hard to say how it started. She remembers a terrible headache creeping in behind her eyes, growing in intensity as yet another Admiral came over to offer his regards and congratulations. She remembers Tom fixing her with a glass of champagne, the first of many. She dimly recalls meeting Chakotay’s eyes across the crowded room, pleading for help much like her own had to be. She remembers him whisking a mêlée from an ice-bucket, and quirking his head towards the back door.
She knows the bottle had to be empty by the time she pulled him in for that kiss that went on and on and beyond, because the wretched thing fell into her lap before tumbling down to the floor, and afterwards her gossamer-thin dress wasn’t even moist.
Well. At least not from the champagne.
She remembers whispering the lock combination for her room door into his ear, asking him to wait—‘Only two minutes, Chakotay!’; ‘I’m not sure I could last this long without you…’—before following her upstairs.
The next time she sees him, he is standing in the doorway leading to the dining room and telling her the Doctor found him asleep in a small, cramped hallway beyond the reception hall, applied some hypo and sent him to bed.
He doesn’t remember how he’d got to the hallway, nor what he was doing before falling asleep, he tells her sheepishly.
It’s even worse than crying herself to sleep after realizing he wasn’t coming: because now she’s supposed to act as if nothing has happened between them, keep up the just-recovered-our-friendship-from-the-ashes-of-Delta-Quadrant routine, not ask about Seven (who is very obviously no longer “attached” to Chakotay, or vice versa) and drink her damn coffee with a bright smile.
This is too much, she decides, rising up from her chair as a wave of nausea overcomes her. “I’m sorry,” she speaks hastily, painfully aware that all of their eyes are suddenly fixed on her, “I need to—I shall see you later.”
She practically runs from the room, tears prickling dangerously in the corners of her eyes. It’s the exhaustion, and the coming down from an adrenaline high, she tells herself. She shouldn’t have bothered with getting up for breakfast after having spent the night crying like a stood-up fourteen-year-old: except she’d wanted to spend a little more time with them, the people who have become her family during the last seven years. People she loves.
Some—she’s finally free to admit it, and look where that’s got her—more than others.
The elevator door opens and she steps quickly through, giving her floor number in a shaky voice and leaning her forehead against the wall, the tears almost ready to start fallingagain.
He slips inside just as the door starts to close, and turns her to face him, his face a perfect picture of concern. “Kathryn, what is it? What’s wrong?”
She looks up and immediately squeezes her eyes shut, because of course she catches him running his tongue across his bottom lip—something he did to her mere hours before. “It’s nothing, really,” she says, well aware that she’s crying silently, belying every word that comes out of her mouth. “I’ll be fine, Chakotay, I just need to—“
“You need to talk to somebody about this, whatever ‘this’ is,” he insists, following her as she exits the elevator and heads for her room. “Don’t cut me off, Kathryn. I’m here for you.”
Only you’re not, not the way I want you to, she bites her lip to stop herself from saying, her hands shaking as she tries to enter her key combination into the small panel and fails repeatedly. “Damn it!” she hisses, and tries again, muttering under her breath, “Five, seven, three—“
“—double nine, one.” They both freeze as the door slides open, and Chakotay frowns, stepping into the room and turning towards her. “Why do I know this, Kathryn?”
She walks past him, intent on making him leave before she collapses completely. “I don’t know, Chakotay. Maybe you read it off a PADD at Allocation.”
He shakes his head, rubbing his forehead with sweaty fingertips, clearly at a loss. “No, that can’t be it. I remember your voice—the numbers…” He looks up, utterly confused and breaking through every one of her defenses. “Kathryn?”
The way he speaks her name—the way he always spoke her name—is the last straw to break her back. “I told you,” she whispers, turning away from him and towards the window, unable to meet his confused eyes any longer. “Last night, when… after we… before you went to sleep.”
She hopes beyond hope he accepts her feeble attempt at an explanation and leaves—but isn’t much surprised when she feels him come closer, the familiar feeling of his warm, sheltering presence at her side. He raises a hand and uncurls a wisp of her hair from the messy up-do she pulled it into this morning, wrapping it around his finger. “Last night,” he repeats thoughtfully. “Last night, when we… what, Kathryn? What did we do? Because I woke up from the strangest, loveliest, most realistic dream today, and I’ve been dying to—“
There’s so much hope and fear in his eyes that she simply cannot stand to torment him any longer.
So she does exactly the same thing as on the previous night, and pulls at his shirt, bringing his lips down to hers.
They both sigh—in pleasure, in relief, in overwhelming happiness: it doesn’t really matter, not anymore—as the sensation of kissing and being kissed hits them both with newfound clarity. Kathryn sways on her feet, relying on Chakotay to hold her—and laughs out loud when he picks her up from the floor easily, pressing small, quick kisses down her neck. “I hope this place has a decent room service.”
She feels the words vibrating against the skin of her collarbone rather than hears them, and smiles, although the man is infuriatingly hindering her efforts of removing his shirt, by being quite adamant to taste every bit of her skin currently on display. “And why is that?”
“Because,” he explains, walking into the bedroom in quick, confident strides, and lowering them both gently on the unmade bed, “I’m not trusting you with a replicator in anyquadrant—“
“Hey!”
“—and there’s no way either of us leaves this room for the foreseeable future.”
She quirks a challenging eyebrow at him and throws his shirt across the room to land in a heap on a small writing desk. “I need to be in Indiana six days from now, you know.”
Chakotay looks suddenly sheepish, pausing in his—very admirable—task of kissing her, and it’s Kathryn’s turn to search for his gaze, holding his head between her palms. “Chakotay? What did I say?”
“It’s nothing,” he repeats her words from minutes before, and she knows he’s hiding something: they’re completely transparent to one another, but that doesn’t mean there’s no more rush, no more wonder as they look at each other—on the contrary, her world still revolves around him, or spins with him, and it’s the best feeling, one that should never sto—oh.
“You know,” she muses, almost offhandedly, “I’ve been hoping to spend a few days with my mother, and then head up for a weekend at Lake George before the debriefings start. Know anyone who could handle a temporarily ship-less captain, a pan of freshly baked brownies and a boat?”
The smile on his face is absolutely stunning, so she proceeds to kiss it off immediately, not giving him a chance to answer.
And then everything’s bliss and whispered confessions and rightness, and she thinks: why was I so afraid to let this happen? It’s not like anything’s changed by performing one simple, yet infinitely complex act with the man she’s grown to trust with her heart.
Only—everything has changed.
And, Kathryn decides a few hours later, when Chakotay brings her a brunch to bed, wearing only a very lovely set of dimples, it is definitely a change for the better.
The very best.
/end