Chapter Text
Set the night after "Hunters".
At three in the morning the mess hall belonged to no one, which was why Kathryn Janeway had come to think of it as hers.
She had her rituals. The long walk down from her quarters with the deck lights dimmed to their night cycle. The table by the viewport, where the stars passed by at a speed the eye could not quite hold. The coffee, which she drank because she knew that, after the hours she had already spent tossing and turning, sleep was a destination she was unlikely to reach.
The letter was in the pocket of her slacks. She had read it enough times that she knew it almost verbatim, but she took it out anyway, because there was a difference between knowing a thing and holding it.
Mark had been kind. She may have felt less guilty if he hadn’t been. He had written the way a decent man writes when he had waited for as long as he possibly could and then, gently, stopped – that he had grieved her, that he had married, that he hoped, if she ever read this, that she would be glad for him and that she would be happy too.
She had said a foolish thing that afternoon, in the ready room, with Chakotay sitting across from her and the door shut. She had said that perhaps Mark had been less a man she loved than a safety net she had drawn around herself – a way of belonging to someone far away, so that she never had to risk belonging to anyone here. She had not meant to say it out loud. Perhaps Chakotay had realised, because he hadn’t really said anything. He had only looked at her with that steadiness of his, the look that asked for nothing and offered everything, and she had been glad when Neelix had interrupted them.
She came to the mess hall to think, and tonight, for the first time in months, she was not alone.
Mike Ayala was at the far table, sitting in the dark, with no cup in front of him and a padd face-down beside his hand. He half-rose when he saw her. She waved him still.
"As you were, Lieutenant. I'm off duty. So are you, presumably."
"Couldn't sleep, Captain."
"No," she said. "There seems to be a lot of that going around."
She brought her coffee over and sat beside him without quite deciding to. For a while, neither of them said anything. The stars went by. He wasn’t someone she knew personally. There were only one hundred and fifty other people around her, likely would be until the day she died, and there were so few of them that she could be herself in front of. All she knew of him was his service record, the steadiness of him at tactical on the nights Tuvok was off the bridge, the clipped economy of the security reports he'd handed her when Tuvok couldn't. No more than that.
"You got a letter," she said finally. Not a question. Half the ship had got a letter. Half the ship was awake tonight, scattered through quiet rooms, reading and re-reading.
He turned the padd over and then turned it back, as if he had reconsidered showing her and then thought better of it. "From my wife," he laughed. There was no humour in it. "Ex-wife. She was good enough to make the distinction clear."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. She had reason." He said it without bitterness, which was somehow worse. "She never wanted me to join the Maquis. Thought I was throwing my life away on other people's wars." He looked at the dark window. "She's remarried. Good man, she says. Steady. Home every night."
Kathryn said nothing. She had learned that people in pain did not always need answers. Sometimes they just needed someone they could lean against for a moment.
"It's really the boys I miss," Mike said. "I've got two. Daniel's twelve now. Twelve." He turned the number over like it astonished him. "He was six when I left. He'll remember me a little. My youngest – Mateo –" his voice did something small and then recovered "– he was barely walking. He won't have the first idea who I am."
"You don't know that they won't –"
"No," he said quickly, before she could finish. She didn’t think he agreed with her; he just couldn’t stand the false comfort. "I don't. That's the trouble with being so far away. You don't get to know anything. You just get to imagine, and then you get a letter, and it confirms everything you were afraid was true." He breathed out. "And I feel awful, mourning the letter from her like this, on top of everything else that happened. I mean, it’s nothing, really, is it? Not compared to the rest of it.”
She did not follow. "The rest of it, Lieutenant?"
He looked at her and frowned. Then it seemed to dawn on him – she hadn’t been told. "The Maquis," he said slowly. "Back in the Alpha Quadrant. I’d have thought Chakotay would have told you..."
She kept her face still, which was a skill she had. "Told me what?"
He paused for a moment, and when he started to speak, he did so hesitatingly, as if he were breaking a confidence. "They're gone, Captain," he said. "All of them. The cells, the colonies. The Cardassians and the Dominion killed them all. I'm sorry. I thought you knew."
She concentrated on the feel of the coffee cup in her hand, staring deeply into it. She thought of B'Elanna, who had barely spoken in the senior staff briefing earlier that evening. She thought of conversations going quiet in corridors as she passed, which she’d assumed were people sharing news from home. They were, of course. She just hadn’t realised they’d all received the same news.
And Chakotay had not told her.
She knew the shape of his silence. He would have read that letter alone and kept it close to his chest and gone back to his duties as if nothing had happened, as if that were possible. Because the moment he took it to her, it would become hers too, and he had decided – for her, without asking – that she already had enough to carry. He would not lean on her. He had spent four years being something steady for her and taking quiet care to ensure she never once felt what it cost him.
And she would have let him. She would have taken it, the way she had taken everything else – his loyalty, his judgement, the patience that never ran dry, the feelings he failed to hide. She would take from Chakotay until there was nothing left of him, and he would let her. But you could not build a life with a man who would never let you share the strain.
And that – sitting in the dark with another man's grief laid beside her own – was the moment she finally stopped lying to herself about Mark.
When she had told Chakotay that Mark had been her safety net, it had sounded wise, perhaps even a little brave. But it was a lie, and she saw straight through it now. Mark had nothing to do with it. She could have been free of Mark for years and it would have changed nothing, because the thing standing between herself and Chakotay had never been a man on Earth.
For once, she let herself see the reasons for what they really were.
She would take too much from him. She had just watched herself prove it. That was the first.
And if she ever let him close enough to lose… icy tendrils wrapped around her heart at the thought of it. If she let Chakotay get so close, and the Delta Quadrant took him the way it had taken so many, there would be nothing left of her to stand on the bridge and give the next order. That was the second.
And if none of it happened – if it simply ended the ordinary way that love ends, the way Mike's marriage had ended, the way most things did – it would not end ordinarily. It would crack straight down the centre of the ship: a hundred and fifty people steered by a captain and a first officer who could no longer meet each other's eyes. That was the third.
So, there it was, laid out plain at last. They could not be together for the simplest and most ruinous reason there was: they meant too much to each other. A smaller love she might have survived.
She had gone somewhere far inside herself, and it was Mike's voice that brought her back.
"I don't want to be too forward, Captain." He was watching her with a frankness he would never have risked on the bridge. "But I don't know how you do it. Everyone on this ship looks to you. Every hour of every day. It must be exhausting."
She considered the easy answers – the ones about duty, about the work, the ones she gave the mirror each morning. She was too tired to reach for any of them.
"Lonely," she said. "It's lonelier than anything else."
It was perhaps the most honest she had been in four years. The quiet that followed was not uncomfortable. It was only very full.
They stood at the same moment, as though some signal had passed that neither of them had sent. And then he was simply there – closer than she had judged, taller than she pictured him in her mind, the low light catching the dark shape of him, so that for half a second, he was not quite himself: a tall, dark Maquis, looking at her with a steadiness that asked for nothing and offered everything – the same look she had spent four years pretending not to see on another man’s face.
"You don't have to be alone tonight," he said.
He bent his head, slowly, giving her every chance to step away. And in those few moments, she thought what was perhaps most shameful of all. That she trusted him, absolutely; trusted that he would be discreet, that he would be kind, that he would never try to make this into more than it was, because Chakotay did. She would allow herself this comfort because of Chakotay’s faith in this man, allow it to unlock a door she could never allow Chakotay to walk through, not while they were out here. It was a small and complete disloyalty, and she knew it.
She pushed the thought away and leaned into the kiss.
The comfort of him – the simple, animal fact of another body, the weight and the warmth and the not-being-alone of it – was a reprieve so total that she did not, in the moment, recognise it as grief. Afterwards, she would think that this was how drowning people must feel about the hand that pulls them up: not gratitude, exactly, but a kind of astonished relief that the air was still there.
He was gentle and unhurried and asked for nothing.
And when she came undone, it was the wrong name she called into the dark. But he did not flinch, did not still, did not so much as change his breathing – only gathered her in a little closer, as if he had known all along whose shadow was in the room with them, as if he had brought his own, and the two of them had simply agreed, without words, not to pretend otherwise while they took what comfort they could.
In the morning, there was no awkwardness, which surprised her, before she realised it should not.
He dressed in the dark with the economy of a man used to small quarters and odd hours. She lay still and watched the deck lights come up by slow degrees toward their day cycle, and when he was ready to go, he stopped by the door and looked back at her, and there was something in his face that she would not forget: respect. Not the kind an officer owes his captain. The kind one survivor gives another.
"Captain," he said.
"Mike." It was the first time she had used his name. It seemed important to use it now, to make him understand that she knew exactly who had been here and was not pretending otherwise anymore. "This doesn't –"
"No," he said. "I know. It doesn't." He paused. "It was a good thing, though. For one night, it was a good thing. I won’t regret it."
She looked at him and, for a moment, was taken aback by how truly kind he was.
"Yes," she said. "It was."
He went. She lay a while longer in the strange grief of it, and then she got up and put on the uniform and became the captain again, because it was the only choice she had.
He came to dinner that evening, as he came every week.
She had already decided she would say nothing. To tell him she already knew would mean telling him how, and there was no way she could look at him and say Mike Ayala told me last night, before I let him take me to bed. So, she would let Chakotay tell her himself, and she would pretend it was the first time she was hearing it. She had become a connoisseur of lesser evils.
He waited until the plates were nearly clear. She watched him build up to it – the way he interlocked his fingers in front of him, the slight hunch of his shoulders, how he dragged his tongue over his teeth before he started to speak. She knew all his tells.
"There's something I should tell you," he said. "Before you hear it some other way."
Too late, she thought, and hated herself a little.
He told it plainly. The colonies and the cells and the long roll of the dead; people he had fought beside before there was a Voyager, before there was a her. He told it like a poem he’d had to learn in school, and she understood that he had rehearsed so that he would not have to feel the loss in front of her.
His voice held. Just. His hand lay flat on the table between them, and she knew he wanted her to reach for it, to let him, for one minute, not be alone in it.
But he would not ask. He never asked.
She had held his hand once. There had been no rank then, no hundred and fifty lives depending on them, only a shelter and the rain and his hand in hers, and she had let herself have it because she had believed they were never going home.
Her own hand lifted. A centimetre. Two.
And then she remembered the morning. The feel of another man, and the name she had cried into the dark. To take his hand now would be to begin the very thing she had already, in the small hours, decided she could not have.
She put her hand around her wine glass instead.
"I'm sorry, Chakotay," she said, and heard how steady it came out, how kind, how completely useless. "I'm so sorry."
Something in his face closed, very quietly, the way a door closes in a house where someone is trying not to wake a baby. He drew his hand back. And for just a moment, something harder moved underneath his expression, the look of a man quietly adding to a score he had not realised he'd been keeping. Then it was gone, and he nodded, and he was, as always, gracious about it.
"I know you are," he said.
And that was the worst of it – that he believed her, that he was not even angry, that he gathered up his grief and folded it small again and carried it out of her quarters at the end of the evening as carefully as he had carried it in, so that she would not have to feel its weight.
She loved him. She sat alone with the stars going by and admitted it to the empty room.
She loved him, and she would not let herself have him, and she told herself, as she had told herself a thousand nights, that this was the kind thing. That it was the strong thing. That it was, in the end, for him.
She almost believed it herself.