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I'd forgotten how different things look from Earth.
Never mind that it's four hundred years before the Earth I know. Somehow it's still the center, our point of origin. It's still more home than Dorvan V, or anyplace my family ever lived.
It's even more home than Voyager right now, standing with Kathryn in the sun. The only place I've ever been more home was the planet she and I named after this one.
She has no idea how beautiful she is, with her hair hanging down her back, the light gleaming off it. That vee of skin at the base of her neck--the turtleneck usually covers it up. Cool and accessible in white. I can't stop looking at her. I can't seem to stop touching her, either. She doesn't seem to mind.
I don't know what any of this means.
I feel like I'm in the right place, more than any other time I was here--much more than I could have believed I ever would when I sent that message to Necheyev, telling her I was never coming back. Like cutting out a part of me, but I meant it--I haven't been back here since I left Starfleet.
Back to Earth, I mean. Los Angeles itself has been empty for centuries, the purview of archaeologists and marine explorers. This stretch of coast probably went under when the Antarctic Ice Shelf shifted and raised water levels a few centimeters all over the globe. That destroyed a lot of unstable coastline, like this one.
Lost city. Lost time.
I don't feel lost, halfway down the steps of a boardwalk destined to sink into the sea.
With her.
She's just ordered the other two off in a different direction. It's so good to be alone with her, even if we're surrounded by people from this era. I'm still not sure why she took me on this away team--four senior officers off the ship, and an ensign on the bridge with the fate of the solar system at stake. Then again, there's not much I could do on the ship, four hundred years out of time. It's very surreal, walking with her in the California sunshine.
"Well, Kathryn, you got us home," I grin.
I say it without thinking. Her name. I don't think I've said it since we got back to Voyager, at least not to her. In my head I say it all the time.
If she reacts, I'll suggest that it's unwise to use our titles in this century-- it might draw attention to us. But she doesn't even look at me. "Right place, wrong time," she notes easily, waiting for me to catch up with her, not moving until my hand brushes her back.
I leave it there, and she leans into me while we walk and talk. As if these are the roles we always play. She stays close, so I keep her a little in front of me, lest I look at her so long that my pleasure will be obvious to passersby. Grateful that Tom put Tuvok and himself in the tight pants, and me in the loose trousers. She thinks I'm being protective but trying to let her lead. Nothing new there.
We banter about our ancestors. No telling details. There are things we probably don't want to think about--at least, I don't, not now. Her family, settlers in Indiana from generations back. That word, "settlers," what gets displaced, even the name of her home state. I stick to a neutral reference, my grandmother's great-grandmother's schoolteacher great-grandmother, in Arizona around this time. We both have teachers in our families. Common point of origin, like the planet.
A young woman wearing very little beyond the wheels on her shoes crashes into us, drives between us as we fight to stay together. Part protective, part instinctive--we belong not to this time, but with one another in a different one. Or at least I belong to her in that time. My choice.
We let the woman pass through. "She could be my great-great-great-great-great- grandmother," Kathryn notes.
"She does have your legs," I smile. Expecting a disapproving look. She merely grins, not looking at me, and launches into a scientist's lecture on Southern California. So Kathryn's not immune to being compared favorably with another woman. My hand returns to her back.
There's something odd about our interaction. It's very...resolved. Like a decision's been made, one way or the other, like we've had the discussion about us that she's been evading for months. Not tension but ease, as though there's been a conclusion to what we're not even acknowledging ever happened.
Or could happen again.
She's trying to get a bead on readings which shouldn't exist in this century, while I'm thinking about the current which brought us here. Why now, why this moment? I remember studying the career of Captain Kirk, who used some sort of temporal manipulator to fix a timeline altered by a member of his crew. He arrived weeks before the pivotal event, so he had enough time to figure out what that event might be. Had too much time, time to do more than just research. Time to fall in love.
How long might we be stuck here? A month, a decade? Tuvok thought a slingshot might alter the timeline further.
We could find ourselves living on Old Earth for as long as we expected to live on Voyager.
This is not a time to pursue that line of thought.
She rests her hand on my chest as she turns. Comfortable. Playing at being lovers. It's hard to take tricorder readings, even in a crowd like this, without looking conspicuous. She uses my body as a shield, my arms around her. Finally she figures out where the blips are coming from.
Back in the sun after following the man who has turned out to be our nemesis. We have a clear plan of action now: wait until evening, then steal into the office of the man who stole the timeship. Kathryn is nervous about using our counterfeited currency, but I buy fruit, fried mushrooms, potato chips. Things our replicators have never gotten right. I'm tempted by the real tobacco. If there were fresh corn anywhere, I'd spend the rest of the day eating.
When I insist, Kathryn drinks two cups of coffee and eats a brownie covered with sticky sauce which she licks off her fingers. "My mother used to make caramel brownies," she says. For a minute she looks homesick. I lift her hand holding the brownie and steal a bite. "Hey!" The caramel pulls and falls across her wrist. I scrape it off with my teeth, gently. "Chakotay," she reproaches with a giggle, but whether it's for nibbling her food or her skin, I'm not sure.
That's when we realize the police are following us.
Cops look the same in any era, and they're just as unsubtle now as in our time. It's definitely the two from earlier--the ones who found us with Braxton. Kathryn sees them at the same instant I do, and freezes, just a little too conspicuously. I wish I could remember what Braxton thought we were--social workers? What precisely did social workers do in this era? We could ask Tom, but can't risk communicating with him now. We need some pretense, for what we're doing here and for why we don't like them looking. An innocent reason for looking guilty.
"We could go under the boardwalk," I say.
People aren't so different over a half-millennium. Boardwalks never change. There are always things going on under them, things that law enforcement officials are curious about even when they're innocuous. People don't change in some ways.
Kathryn knows as well as I do that what I've just asked her could be interpreted as a proposition, in any era.
"All right," she agrees, to my surprise.
The idea of taking off my shoes and walking in the sand with her nearly drives me out of my mind. If we had a towel, or time to take a swim...but we don't. She's agreeing to a command ploy. Nothing more.
It's late afternoon on what is apparently a work day, and there are not many people under the boardwalk. A few shabbily-dressed men who are drunk on real alcohol, a smell I haven't missed. A man emptying his bladder. Two very young men and a woman who appear to be engaged in some kind of transaction--selling pharmaceuticals, selling flesh, I can't tell from where we are. No couples. From what I've seen of the beach, lovers are comfortable doing nearly everything in public that people usually do in private. Showing more skin than is safe in this level of radiation, wearing clothes which hardly seem functional.
It's impossible not to think about sex here.
I wonder how she's thinking about it. If she's ever been on a boardwalk, or under one. If she's aware of my palm, sweaty against her crisp white suit. We're overdressed. For the heat, and for the beach, and for what we're about to pretend to do.
The cops have followed us down the steps, are standing at some distance away, distracted by the younger men and woman who have separated hastily. All we have to do is look occupied, and they'll go.
She turns, and steps into my arms.
It must be the sun that makes us so familiar, the sun and the smell of the water. Salt here and sweet on New Earth, but like nothing on the ship, not even on the holodeck. My fingers are in her ponytail, her hands on my shoulders--I'm not sure whether she's trying to hold some distance between us or if it's a prelude to embracing.
I kiss her anyway.
She kisses me back. Soft and relaxed at first, waiting to see what I'm going to do, then I feel her mouth opening. The barest flicker of her tongue against my lip. I'm not ready for what that does to me; it's like she licked me somewhere far more intimate.
I'm crushing her in my arms, letting my tongue thrust into her mouth the way I'm thrusting against her belly through the clothes. Photon torpedos armed and ready, Captain. Not since I was a teenager have I responded this fast to a woman. My hand rises to her breast of its own will, trying to feel through three layers of cloth. I wasn't this bad as a teenager, mauling girls like this.
She isn't pulling away.
As an ostentatious show for the cops, this is overstatement. And for her...she grinds against me a little, saucily, nowhere near my level of arousal but definitely not resisting. Squealing as I fan kisses across her neck. I'm biting, sucking, probably going to leave a mark. She almost sounds like she's laughing. No rejection, no distance, but definitely amused. That does give me pause, a little.
"Aren't you going to tell me to stop, Captain?"
"Chakotay, it's four hundred years in the past. I haven't been assigned as captain of Voyager yet."
"We're not exactly in a command situation?" Again. She can joke about it. She thinks I can joke about it.
"Well, we can't afford to stain the clothes."
I can't believe I'm hearing those words from her mouth. She has a wicked smile on her face, definite pleasure. She doesn't look anything like any version of her I've ever seen. Not a trace of the professional demeanor, in these anachronistic clothes and in this casual setting and the devilish expression...but still the captain. A combination of the woman I had on New Earth and the woman I can't ever have on the ship. For the moment, it's not a contradiction.
Irresistible, and she knows it.
"Kathryn," I breathe, barely audibly, in the silence.
Complete silence.
The cops are gone. We both notice it at once.
This isn't going to happen, what we started. Even if she wanted it as anything other than an attraction of the moment, exacerbated by the clothes and the fresh air. Risking arrest for indecent exposure is hardly going to do our crew any good, or the timeline, or either of us.
Definitely not going to happen, not unless we get stuck here, in the past, four hundred years before she'll become my captain...
A momentary fantasy about staying. Building a house, living off the land. We had that once. I prayed for it again--not really wanting to be stranded without ever seeing another soul or another planet, but to have a home with her, to get to someplace where our titles wouldn't stand between us. We could get jobs in this century, could even travel together, as archaeologists maybe--she might like that, she's a scientist. We could be happy here, happier than we would have been on New Earth. We could...
Of course we couldn't. We can't interfere with the timeline, can't risk making discoveries. If we have to stay here, our little community will have to go into hiding. No replicator, no communicators.
She'll be miserable.
I'm miserable. This is a moment out of time, when who we are doesn't matter; alone together, the sun beginning to set over the Pacific. A day never to be repeated. I look at her, catch her scent mingled with the dank wood of the boardwalk and the sea and the spices and the sun.
She kisses me lightly on the mouth. Runs a hand down my sleeve, just enough to tickle, affectionate but not a come-on.
"Enough?" she asks.
Never enough, and she knows it. But I smile and nod, and move out from under the boardwalk with her, into the slanting light of a late afternoon on Earth.
A day never to be repeated? Time doesn't move only in one direction. Infinite probabilities co-exist, universes split at moments like this one. In another reality, she and I are still kissing under the boardwalk. And we're on the ship together, and on my ship instead of hers. We've settled in a home among the 37s, and we're back on Earth in our own era--maybe exploring the ruins of what was once Venice Beach.
Or maybe we're still on New Earth, dreaming. Dreaming our rescue and everything that came after. By the river in the sun, asleep in one another's arms. Somewhere, sometime. Together.
I look at her, my captain, moving away from me up the steps to the boardwalk, and I'll believe that no matter who we become. No matter what happens. Our future has no end.