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“But really . . .” she says after a long silence, not lifting her cheek from its resting place against his chest, “Did you?”
A dozen teasing answers spring to mind, but here: alone and stripped of all armor, the last thing he wants to do is to put a wall up. So he runs his fingertips back down her bare spine, soaking in the reality of Kathryn: here in his arms at long last and replies simply: “No.”
Why do you say that like it is a confession?” she questions, turning her face to look up into his, while staying wrapped close against him. “Do you have something more shameful to tell me than what you apparently didn’t do while stuck alone on that planet with my hologram for ten years?”
Kathryn’s voice is curious, no hint of accusation or resentment to be found. She can be a jealous mistress, this woman he loves with his entire being, but that apparently doesn’t extend to whatever she was imagining might have passed between him and her hologram. (At least not right now, in the security of her bed with him naked and spent beside her.)
It is a fair question. It isn’t like the thought never occurred to him. It’s not even like holoJaneway (yes, he still insists on thinking of her that way, never holoKathryn) hadn’t broached the topic. (That’s irony for you, isn’t it? All the years the two of them spent talking around it, but he’s had dozens of conversations about himself and Kathryn with her holographic facsimile.) He spent a decade with only holoJaneway for comfort and he wouldn’t even let himself truly have that.
“It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?” he has to admit. “But as much as having that little imitation sliver of you kept me going, kept me alive . . . I think it would have hurt more than it would have helped to pretend like that.”
I didn’t deserve the comfort, a voice inside of him adds. Not after what happened to my crew, to Adreek . . . Not knowing I could never come back to you and you might never know why.
“Noble,” she bites her lip with a smile. “Principled. Honorable. Long suffering.”
And with that, Kathryn shifts her weight to roll more evenly on top of him, beginning to crawl her way up.
“I felt more like I was being a petulant child sometimes,” he admits. “Refusing comfort, taking my own frustrations out on an imperfect copy for not actually being you.”
Which isn’t exactly the romance hero answer, but that’s kind of the point. He’s here now, running his fingers through the bits of gray in Kathryn’s hair. She’s real and he can be too, finally. This isn’t some hallucination, some fantasy temptation too pristine to be true. He looks up into her smile lined face and his regret is that he wasn’t there to see every millimeter of them forming.
“After spending time recently with some actual children, I can assure you that you, Chakotay, are very much not like one,” Kathryn promises, looking him directly in the eyes as she sits up, legs straddling his waist.
He moves his hands to her hips, caressing the skin as he slides them slowly upwards. “Are you calling me old?” he teases, even though they are visibly so now, must seem even more so to those youth than they do to each other.
“We’ve still got time,” she assures him, “Though maybe not the kind we once imagined.”
He knows what she means. Time to be together, not time to have and raise children. Though, in a way, they have already been doing that last bit. He’s seen the imprint Kathryn left in those kids, and he wants to hope that he’s made a difference with them as well, despite the rocky start.
“Pretty sure we’re still way ahead of that original estimate of when we would reach home, by a number of decades,” Chakotay offers.
Her breasts sit heavily in his hands, like they long for rest as much as he has. He’s grateful to hold them, feel her warmth, and have her close.
“I’m not complaining,” she agrees, beaming down at him like some sort of renaissance painting of a divine vision, and then she shifts, face turning serious. “Oh, Chakotay, I really thought I might have lost you for good this time.”
He was sure he had lost her forever. He gave up, stopped trying. Kathryn, at least, somehow sent those kids to him. She kept fighting. He was lost without her.
“I know that, before I left, we tabled talking about our future for my return. Are we still . . . ”
He has to ask, even though they are here in her quarters, in her bed, even though she’s pressing her body into his embrace once more and looking at him like this. He has to ask. He’s sure that they still love each other, but when has that ever stopped Kathryn from believing they can’t be?
“We have to find a way to send the Protostar back to where it belongs and stabilize the timeline, but when that’s done . . . Chakotay, I am done waiting for the right time to live our lives together. I don’t care what Jellico and all the rest think anymore. Consequences be damned. Someone else can handle the next crisis, if it comes to that. That’s what losing you for such a long time taught me. I can’t give you up and I don’t want to anymore.”
“About damn time,” he can’t help saying, just before she collapses down on top of him, his hands trapped between her body and his own, her mouth finding his.
And this time is different than the way they stumbled in here not so long ago, relieved and shaken, hands needing to find purchase everywhere, to touch and feel that this wasn’t a mirage, a dream they would wake from more desperate than ever. Oh, thank you universe for bringing you back to me, every touch seemed to scream in relief.
And that’s still here, not something that can be washed away in a few short hours, but now that they have tasted and talked, now that the spell has been broken without all being lost: reality is shattering, but not because of them . . . well not entirely at least. The worst has happened and they are still here. In that light all the fears and hesitations and excuses-
“I should have gone out there with you,” Kathryn confesses into the underside of his jaw. “I should have done more-”
“If you’d been marooned with me out there, who would have defied the whole Federation to bring us back?” he points out, cupping her face in both hands and bringing her eyes to meet his.
“Maybe we could have just stayed lost,” she suggests, like she’s saying something greater. “As long as we were lost together.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, Kathryn. You’ve never been one to accept defeat.”
He brushes a few strands of hair out of her face, searching her expression for a clue as to where she’s actually coming from, what she’s trying to say.
“Maybe you were right all those years ago, Chakotay. Maybe it’s not defeat, maybe it’s embracing what life has given us.”
Which time? On New Earth? Before they got in the middle of the Borg and Species 5472? Which of any dozen other times that immediately come to mind? He doesn’t ask. He supposes that it doesn’t actually matter, not from this vantage point.
“I thought that was what we were doing,” he suggests instead, one hand still on her face but the other moving to the small of her back.
And she shakes her head, chuckling silently and places another kiss on his lips before moving her way down his throat. Her hands press down on his chest, urging him to say where he is as she shifts her body, shimmying downwards slowly, eyes locking onto his as she continues kissing her way downwards, past his shoulders, down his ribcage. He’s far from a young man but he’s been waiting so long for this reunion and in spite of his exhaustion his body is starting to stir once more in response to her.
“Kathryn . . . “he groans, as her attention slips past his navel, kissing along his hip bones, and she reanchors her hands on his thighs.
“The night before you left on the Protostar mission,” she inhales, lips brushing against him as she places the softest of kisses trailing up the underside of his cock, “You know, I spent all of those years thinking that if we were to consummate our relationship physically and then found ourselves forced apart it would make it worse, but the truth was the reverse. These past years, knowing that we didn’t put it off this last time, having the memory of our time together . . . I didn’t regret having finally given in. I drew strength from it, from knowing that we weren’t separated with that question left unanswered.”
He knows what she means. It is part of why he had been able to reconcile himself to sacrificing himself for her and the rest of their reality. No longer had he been the man who had never held Kathryn Janeway in his arms, never felt the love between them expressed in sound and touch and ecstasy.
“I won’t say I told you so,” he exhales, shuddering as one of her hands encircles the base of his cock, the other cupping his balls.
Then she’s wrapping her mouth around the tip and slowly sinking down, her tongue tracing the bulge of a vein, her movements not rushed by certain.
And he’s replayed that night between them before his ill fated mission enough times to know that she must have too, that she also remembers every touch and kiss and pleasure. Didn’t get around to this, she seems to be saying.
He’s more than happy to let her guide him a bit, as she banishes whatever remaining sluggishness might have been left in his body. She experiments a bit, positioning, suction, like this is as much of an exploration as any other mission.
But before long he’s urging her back up his body, hands tangling in her hair and gripping her waist, and finding her just as wet as her mouth when her hips come level with his.
“Cha-ko-tay . . .” she gasps, body arching back as she bears down onto him and they both shudder. “Cha-ko-”
“I’m here,” he breathes, “I’m not going anywhere.”
He pushes up onto his elbows, needing to be closer against her, feeling their bodies come together and then draw back only slightly, like neither of them can bear to truly separate.
“I had this whole plan of how I was going to catalog every inch of you. . . “ she stammers, her hands gripping his shoulders tightly, breath ragged.
“You still can,” he promises, knowing exactly what she’s thinking because that feeling is mutual. “I promise I’ll be a good scientific subject and let you document. Just . . . maybe once we’ve taken the edge off.”
He’s not sure when that will be. He’d thought that their next time together would be more relaxed, leisurely, but if anything this feels more intensely urgent, less relief and more compulsion. The world has gotten smaller, collapsed like a dying star into a gravitational well into this bed and the two of them on it, devouring one another like two people who have been dying of thirst and now found the one oasis in the desert.
“It’s as though I’ve been limping along, running off reserve power, and now suddenly everything is back online,” Kathryn pants, her body starting to shake against his.
And that’s the truth of it, there. Chakotay didn’t realize how lost he was until she found him the first time and it’s been almost two decades but she’s his lighthouse, his northern star, the very air he breathes.
And that’s been true in the philosophical sense this whole time, but as his hands map Kathyrn’s skin, as they wrap themselves as closely into each other as possible, it’s also a sort of alchemy: all that hope, and loss, and waiting, and longing transubstantiated from potential into kinetic energy.
He couldn’t have said, later, which of them was the first to break open. Kathryn’s pleasure was a lightning bolt that ran through him. His need was an echoing crash of thunder. The ecstasy left him deaf, dumb, and blind . . . groping for solid ground and finding it in her skin.
“If you’d been out there with me,” he says sometime later, once both of their breathing has regulated and their bodies’ quivering has finally stilled, gazing at Kathryn rested in the crook of his arm with a smile on her face, “You wouldn’t have been able to stay put and accept our exile. You would have been determined to find a way off that rock. You wouldn’t have been able to rest.”
If he knows Kathryn, she’s barely slept since he first disappeared and has been running almost entirely on coffee and sheer willpower.
You don’t have to do it anymore, he thinks not for the first time. They aren’t out in the Delta Quadrant alone; there are other admirals that could handle things while she gets some actual rest in.
That’s not why she does it though, not anymore at least. Chakotay can’t pretend to know whether she was like this before they were stranded out there in the Delta Quadrant, but he knows the woman she became afterwards.
She needs it. Kathryn Janeway loves a good bath or a holonovel, but give her more than a few days of leisure and she’s looking for some problem that needs fixing.
And that’s the woman he loves, not the slim leg draped over his or the curve of her eyebrow or the texture of her hair against his skin.
“Maybe I’d have surprised you,” she shrugs, but she doesn’t deny it further.
“Maybe, but it’s alright if you wouldn’t. I love you, Kathryn, not some cleaned up version of you with all the rough edges sanded off.
“Not my hologram,” she laughs.
“I’m serious,” he insists.
“I know,” she nods, snuggling closer into his side. “Although, I’ll admit it’s a little hard to take anything you say terribly seriously with that ridiculous thing on your face.
She reaches out and traces the absurd mirror fashion goatee he’s still sporting, having been in more of a hurry to be alone here with Kathryn than to banish it and return to the smooth shaven version of himself that belongs here with her.
“You know, everything I have ever read about the mirrorverse says that love can’t exist there, that even the more passionate of lovers are ready to turn on each other at the drop of a hat. But that’s not what I saw in their eyes,” he pauses, “That version of us, they were still an unbreakable unit. I was able to convince them because they had faith in each other.”
“And just what do you think that means?” Kathryn asks.
“You and me, we’re the real deal. Everyone thinks their love is the one that spans across timelines, but we do. It means that when I thought I’d never see you again and I tried to take comfort in the idea that countless other Kathryns and Chakotays had found a way to stay together I was not wrong.”
It hadn’t worked, but that’s not the point. The point is his faith in her, in them.
“Be that as it may, I’m glad to have you back in this reality.”
“So am I,” he has to agree heartily, “So am I.”
Soon, they will have to get out of this bed. He will get rid of the mirrorverse look, and replicate a uniform. They will go back out into the world beyond, check on the kids, figure out how to save the timeline. But for now, he runs his hand along her side, tracing the shape of the curve of her hip, and thinks that it can all wait a little longer.
He kisses her forehead. Her cheek. Her neck. Her shoulder. Down between her breasts. Kathryn stretches herself out on the bed and parts her thighs. Chakotay plants himself between them, buries his face against her skin, tastes himself between her thighs and still dripping from inside of her. He laps appreciatively, as the evidence of him fades into pure Kathryn.
“You don’t have to fit a decade worth of attention into one night,” Kathryn moans, hips bucking up into his mouth.
“I know,” he replies, pausing to drag his tongue across her clit. “But you can’t begrudge me a little head’s start.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” she shivers, hands finding purchase gripping his scalp as her legs wrap around his head.