Chapter Text
Love: I am studying a different book
and yes, a book is a finite thing
In it your death can never be reversed
the deaths I have witnessed since never undone
The light drained from the living eyes
can never flash again from those same eyes
I make you no promises
but something’s breaking open here
There were certain extremes we had to know
before we could continue
Call it a book, or not
call it a map of constant travel
From ‘One Kind of Terror’ by Adrienne Rich, 1983
ONE
“Would you leave,” he asks, “if it were me in there, instead of you?”
She turns her head, looks at him across the scant twelve inches of utterly uncrossable space that separates them. What she can see in his eyes cuts deeper than the invisible wound she has already sustained. She has thought, sometimes, that this might be the thing that finally does for her: not the sheer and inevitable brutality of forging a path through unknown space, but this wholly unasked for and unexpected connection. That, out of everything she has weathered in the Delta Quadrant, the perpetual storm that is him (always there, oh, just there, on her periphery) will be what finally sinks the flimsy raft on which she has pretended to stand firm for so long.
She is sweating, eyes blurring with the salt from her brow and something else too. There will be no more tomorrows for her. With no future there is no possibility that she could regret anything now except telling him the absolute truth.
“Of course I wouldn’t.”
She imagines she can feel herself disintegrating one cell at a time, an unstoppable internal cascade failure. In this analogy her heart is the warp core, something else she has sometimes wished she could jettison. How much easier life would be were the heart not quite so fragile, so prone to injury, so vulnerable to the inconvenient wrecking ball of unexpected desire.
“Kathryn,” Chakotay says, as if there is nothing beyond her name that could possibly matter at that moment. She hopes he’ll say it to himself occasionally in years to come. Not so much that it ties him to her memory forever, but just enough that he does not forget the feel of it in his mouth. She has always loved the sound of her name in his voice, and not only because for years he has been the only person to call her by it.
He’s not quite devastated yet, but he will be. This she knows because she would be, too, if it were him this side of the forcefield, instead of her. It is a blessed mercy to her that he is not. She already knows she wouldn’t survive it, and isn’t that the whole point of those last twelve inches of separation that she has always maintained between them? Her margin for error, her desperate measure of safety. The realisation of just how utterly absurd that was reaches her now in a flash so stark she would laugh if she weren’t in so much pain. As if it would have made a difference. As if losing him now would have made it easier than if…
But no, not that, not now.
As always, there are more important things to think about.
“Promise me you’ll get them home,” she says.
“Kathryn-“
“Tell me you will, Chakotay. Tell me.” He never breaks his word. He never has, not in all the years she’s known him.
His eyes glimmer in the red glare, his hand twitches and then curls into a fist where it rests on his thigh. “I will.”
She nods, her head knocking back against the console behind her, shuts her eyes. Her watch, ending.
“Chakotay,” she says, the whole of her just a whisper now, barely even there, “if things had been different-“
“Don’t,” he says, his voice rough in the middle and broken at the edges. He’s never asked her for anything before and now that he is, it hurts. “Don’t.”
[TBC]