Although "Leavetaking" is the most unabashedly sentimental thing I've
ever written, there's no sex. No romance even. I know this sounds very
unlike me, but it sort of sprang full-blown into my head while dozing, and
I hate to edit my subconscious mind... Be kind if you send feedback, I'm
still feeling out of sorts from the level of depression required to write
this sort of thing.
Paramount owns the versions of these characters who reside in a parallel
universe. I'm responsible for the variations herein.
LEAVETAKING
by Michelle Erica Green (tigger@cais.com)
"That's pretty much everything," Paris nodded, looking around the
stripped bridge as they headed toward the turbolift. "The shuttle's
waiting. I asked for the privilege of piloting you in. We can take off
whenever you're ready."
Chakotay was surprised by Tom's gallantry. In all these years, he and
Paris had never become confidantes, but they had drifted into friendship
in the comfortable way of people used to sitting in the same place for
hours a day, left to forge a bond of toleration. Yet much as he hated to
let the younger man down, Chakotay had one thing more to do before he left
Voyager. "I really appreciate your waiting for me. But there's a piece
of business I still need to attend to, Tom."
Paris looked at him as if he would say something, then bit his lip and
turned away. "I understand, Commander."
He had stayed "Commander" throughout the forty-some years of the
journey. "Go on without me, Paris," Chakotay said.
He pressed the panel a few times, engaged the privacy protocol, and
entered the grid-lined room. She was standing with her back to him, hands
on her hips, staring into the darkness where the generator lay.
"Captain," he said heavily.
Relaxing her arms, she turned to gaze at him in surprise. "It's been a
long time."
The faint hint of a smile quirked the corners of his lips. "Well, I'm
finally off duty. We're home."
"Home?!" Animation lit her features.
"We're in spacedock. I'm on my way down to Federation HQ. In a few
hours, Starfleet is supposedly going to restore my official commission and
promote me to my acting rank."
"We'll be equals, then," she smiled back, putting a hand on his arm.
"No, we won't. I'm going to resign."
A look of disquiet flickered across her face. "Are you sure that's what
you want to do?"
"Yes."
"Why not wait a few weeks, go visit your people? See how things have
changed? Surely there isn't a Maquis any longer..."
"You're right," he interrupted. "But I don't want to work for the
system for awhile. I've been thinking about going to Vulcan, to study with
their spiritual masters. Tuvok said I'm welcome to stay with his family for as
long as I like."
Crossing her arms over her chest, she cocked and then shook her head,
regarding the floor. Her chin lowered, her eyes turned up like beacons to
his face. "You can't bury yourself behind Vulcan discipline, Commander."
"Call me Chakotay. I won't be 'Commander' much longer." He felt himself
growing unreasonably angry with her. "And Tuvok and I have been friends
for a long time now. We have a lot in common."
The blue eyes snapped sharply at him. "Tuvok's back where he belongs,
Chakotay. And so are you. You should have deleted this program a long
time ago."
"I know." His nostrils flared involuntarily as his eyes began to sting.
It hurt fiercely to hear her say it, the way it had hurt years ago to realize
that she would never stand with him apart from their roles and the endless
small details which kept them separated. Honest to the last--or, after all
these years, had she grown more so, because he needed her to be that way? He
would never know for sure. "I came to tell you..."
The word stuck in his throat. He remembered vividly the last time she
had said it to him. Rolling her eyes slighly as she ran down a litany of
things for him to remember while she was away from Voyager--he had had
several questions, but she had been in a hurry to complete the mission,
she had waved them away, squeezing his shoulder as she stepped onto the
platform. "Just take care of the ship while I'm gone," she said as she
put her hands on her hips, waiting. Then an odd grin crooked her mouth,
and she added, "Goodbye, Commander." Her form had shimmered away, still
smiling at him. And then the panel exploding, sparks flying from the
transporter console...
"Commander." Her voice, unchanged, jerked him back to the present. "I'm
not the one you need to say goodbye to." She paused, and her voice
softened. "She's been dead for over thirty years, Chakotay."
He felt like an adolescent being given a child's lecture by an adult,
humiliation on top of the anguish. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you need to remember it, now of all times. You've been dragging her around with you for half your life, and that's too long." He bit his lip. "She didn't expect that from the people she left at home in the first
place. If she was here now, you'd still be going your separate ways."
It had taken him more than a year to figure out how to upload her empty
pattern into the hologenerator, months of replaying her logs, her mission
records, her personnel reports--every detail he could remember, or eke out
of anyone else during early-morning conversations. At times he thought
he'd done his job too well. He could not shake the feeling of being an
impostor in her chair. He'd lacked her core of confidence, her aptitude
for judgment, so he'd retained those qualities in a projection of her.
Now he knew that in doing so, he had placed them permanently outside
himself.
Yet the reproduction was woefully incomplete. She was programmed to
react like his captain, so she touched him when she wanted his attention,
she fretted about his concern for the ship. But the hidden thoughts and
memories of her original, the secret fears and desires, the delicate
thread of spirit could not be duplicated. Chakotay looked into the
incandescent eyes of the ageless woman before him. "You have no way of
knowing that," he said through his teeth.
In everything she'd left behind, the captain had said scarcely a word
about her inner life--and he'd seen her personal logs, he'd decoded and
read her encrypted files--he'd behaved shamelessly in the weeks after they
had lost her. Her command frustrations were wryly reported in the
transcripts. But he'd thought that her private files might give him some
access to her vulnerabilities, even a sentimental side she kept buried
under the focused exterior.
Yet she rarely talked about home, not even the man she'd left there--in
fact, she recalled her dog as often as her parents. And there was only
one mention of himself which caught his attention--a short, cryptic entry,
made just after that Romulan, who'd come through the wormhole from the
Alpha Quadrant and the past, had left with their messages home. "I told
Mark to go on with his life," she'd said with a shaky smile, not quite
looking into the screen as she spoke. "I told my parents not to worry
about me. I told Starfleet what I thought could happen out here with the
crew. And I told them all about Chakotay."
Told who what? Told Starfleet that she expected the former Maquis
leader to try to mutiny and ditch her somewhere on the far side of the galaxy?
Told her parents that she thought him gullible enough to control? Did she tell
her lover that she thought of her second in command as anything other than a
decent officer--and, if the latter, did she mean it, or was it just a way of
forcing Mark to let her go, so he would be free?
The fact that he himself no longer owed her anything brought no comfort.
There had been times when months would pass without him looking at this
program; sometimes even more than a day would go by when he did not think
of her at all. But always he would enter his ready room and expect for a
moment to see her behind the desk, or, striding onto the bridge, he would
move automatically toward the chair which was occupied most recently by
Tuvok. And then her absence would crush him anew, he couldn't stand it, he
had to talk to her one more time.
"Why don't you reprogram me at least?" she asked in a tone of vague,
rational annoyance. "This version of me obviously hasn't gotten you
anywhere."
"On the contrary. It's gotten me back."
"Then bring it up to date. What do you think I'd look like at eighty?
Not like this." She spread her arms to indicate her eternally erect
carriage, her figure, her shining hair. "What you should have done with
my pattern was to produce a body and hold a funeral. Then you might have
been able to let go."
Vanished into thin air. Intolerable. He knew as much about transporter
technology as anyone who served under him; for weeks after the accident he
had read every manual, forcing himself to believe that if they pressed the
right button, she would simply rematerialize. He'd had Kim and Torres
working late into the night on the circuitry, he would not permit anyone
else to touch the console where her pattern was imprinted. B'Elanna
wondered aloud whether he wasn't putting on a show for the crew, to
demonstrate that he'd tried absolutely everything to retrieve the captain
before assuming command himself. Then, when he stopped speaking to the
chief engineer, she had gotten worried about him. "Commander, even if you
could find some way of bringing enough matter into the pattern buffer to
rematerialize her body, it wouldn't be her. There isn't any synaptic
function in the pattern. Her--soul, or whatever you want to call it--is
gone."
Harry had worked silently with him, probably knowing all along that it
was hopeless but understanding Chakotay's need to try. Once, the ensign
had tried to remember something Janeway had said to him about his
near-death experience, but Chakotay cut him off; he didn't want to talk
about death. Later he was sorry he hadn't let Kim finish. Of all the
things Chakotay needed to know about his captain, her beliefs about the
afterlife should have been the most important. In all these decades of
vision-questing, he had never been able to reach her spirit.
The door behind him opened. He whirled around, wondering who in hell
would have overridden his privacy lockout.
An old man whom he'd never seen before entered, walking slowly. He was
carrying, of all things, a dog. And was looking past Chakotay in horror,
straight at the image which stared blankly back at him.
"Computer, end program," the man croaked.
The onetime terrorist leader strangled a shout as she flickered and
vanished. Had the intruder been any younger, his life would have been in
danger. "What the hell do you..."
"Commander, allow me to introduce myself." The stranger turned. "Mr.
Tuvok let me on board your ship. My name is Mark. I was..."
Chakotay had taken an instinctive step back at the name. "I know who
you are," he snapped. The puppy yelped. Suddenly the face looked familiar:
he'd seen it in photos he'd carefully packed away, the happy couple--dressed up
at official functions, on the beach with her hair down, smiling in uniform next
to the dog. "What do you want?" Chakotay had personally taken the captain's
belongings out of storage where they had remained for years, next to boxes
marked "Stadi" and "Cavit" and "Durst"; it had never occurred to him that there
might be someone left who would come forward to claim them. "How did you find
Tuvok, anyway?" he demanded in the tone of an accusation.
"Tuvok found me." Mark kept his gaze level. "He thought you might want
to talk about Kathryn."
The name hit Chakotay like a blow. Forcing himself not to strike back
physically, he retorted, "Why did you bring that animal onto the ship?"
The older man held the puppy out to him. "He's one of hers. At least,
he's several generations descended from her dog." Chakotay took the
squirming, damp bundle, feeling an odd drop in his stomach as the warm
snout nudged into his armpit. "They used to wake me up like that, right
after she disappeared," Mark sighed. "I'd feel something against my side
and think she was with me. Then I'd start to say her name, and remember
that the puppies couldn't exist in the same memory with her." Chakotay
wavered between fury and empathy. "At first I couldn't stand to change
anything--as if by keeping things exactly as they were, I might be able to
stop time from passing. The puppies ruined that. Five new little lives
which she would never see. Bear chose my bed as the birthplace..."
"Her dog's name was Bear?" He must have known it before, but somehow
that particular fact had never stuck in Chakotay's brain. A sudden
recollection of an expression he hadn't seen for decades now, a slightly
flirtatious smile, *you strike me as the bear type*--
"...I elected not to displace the dog," Mark was continuing, seemingly
oblivious to the commander's interruption. "You know, at one time all the
shedding bothered me. But later it made me feel better to come home and
find fuzz covering the carpets." He paced a few steps. "I had a message
from Admiral Necheyev--incapable of sincerity, that woman." A name out of
the past, a pointed face--suspicious, angry--incapable of sincerity. "'I
regret to have to tell you. No trace from the warp core. Two search
missions failed. We have no plans for further investigation.'"
Mark took a deep breath. "I contacted Admiral Paris at headquarters.
Kathryn had taken his son on the mission, but I guess you know that. Paris
thought she might have thrown in her lot with the Maquis, ridiculous
man--and she served under him for years--but, then, he felt that if his
own son could betray him, so could she. I went to Deep Space Nine to see
Commander Sisko personally. He talked to a Gul he knew to make sure the
Cardassians didn't have the ship, but he couldn't do much else. So just
like that, she was gone...no funeral, no fight, just...nothing."
The abrupt breath Chakotay drew startled the dog, which he had been
absently stroking while the older man spoke. How much had Tuvok told him
about the transporter accident? Mark looked down at the wriggling animal,
smiling sadly. "I was never sure I'd be able to hold onto her anyway. She
would have been a different person if domesticity had been uppermost in
her mind." The puppy whined, and Chakotay set it down absently on the
black grid. It immediately took off at a run. "Instead I have three
generations of her dogs living in my house, not counting this one. My
daughters each have one from this litter."
"Your daughters!"
The old man turned and smiled directly at him, and Chakotay realized
that Mark might be thinking of him as "the old man" as well: he was probably
less than ten years younger than the stranger. "One's an astrophysicist and
one's finishing medical school. My wife's a veterinarian, I married a woman
who'd never traveled further than Mars. Although I think Kathryn would have
liked her--she's bright and organized and doesn't mind having a dog licking her
face at four in the morning."
Chakotay was reeling from conflicting emotions--relief that Mark wasn't
here to steal Janeway's things from him, loathing that he'd put her aside
decades ago, gratitude that he'd brought a gift from her past, burning
envy that he'd had personal memories while he himself had only recordings
and speculation. "Don't judge me too quickly, Commander," Mark said
quietly. "For years I had no idea whether she was alive or dead. It made
sense that she was dead. Tuvok's family assumed that he was gone, they
permitted his wife to take another mate. I thought it would be easier to
learn that she was dead than to be left hanging."
"No, it wouldn't." Nothing Chakotay had done in all his years on
Voyager had come close to being as difficult as filling out Kathryn Janeway's
death certificate--not saying goodbye to Ensign Kim when he elected to remain
on a planet in the Delta Quadrant, not losing six crewmembers and a shuttle to
the Vedeans, not giving the service at Kes' funeral. All those weeks working
on the transporter, he had lied to himself about both the doubtfulness of the
captain's survival and the reasons he could not accept that she was gone.
Regardless of what some of his crew thought, he had never had designs on the
captaincy of the Voyager. He liked being the First Officer, and Janeway was
the finest superior he'd ever imagined. If everyone in Starfleet thought the
way she did, he would never have left.
They had felt comfortable with one another, building on the instinctive
trust and rapport they'd shared from the start. He had never gone out of
his way to socialize with her, but for hours a day their work threw them
together, he had taken her nearness for granted. When the transporter
misfired, he attributed his initial desperation to the pressures of
command, plus the fear that without Janeway to hold them together, the
crew might factionalize. Later he called it loneliness. He missed having
her to talk to on the bridge while the alien stars crept by, he missed her
unselfconscious touching, her invitations to consult over meals which he
forgot to eat otherwise. He found he'd internalized her concerns about
fraternizing with the junior officers. In her absence he longed for her
consumingly, while he worked and rested and particularly when he couldn't
sleep. He even logged messages to give to her when they eventually got
her back.
Finally they had to take the entire transporter system offline to
repower the failing replicators. He resisted for days, and it took the
combined insistence of Torres, Tuvok, Carey, and Kim to change his mind. Faced
down by his senior staff, he downloaded her pattern and shut off the console
himself. Afterwards he walked slowly to the ready room, carrying all that was
left of Kathryn Janeway on a tiny chip.
Goodbye, Commander.
Just take care of the ship while I'm gone.
He sat at her desk, in her chair, imagining that he could still feel the
imprint of her body. Kes had continued to bring flowers up from the
hydroponics bay, so the room was fragrant; the smell reminded him of her.
When he punched up the forms which would legally end her life, he became
so nauseous that he had to lie down.
Meditation was hopeless, trance eluded him. He held the chip so tightly
that it cut into his fingers; he considered idly that if he pressed down
hard, the sharp metal edge would probably gash his wrists deeply enough to
free his spirit from his body, sending him to wherever she was. The
barren hole inside him was unlike anything he'd ever experienced, not even
when he saw the first pictures of what the Cardassians had done to his
planet. He rose to pace the ready room for hours, avoiding the desk and
her chair, hurling the padds against the windows, hitting his head into
the walls.
Just take care of the ship while I'm gone.
Goodbye, Commander.
Finally he became too exhausted to stand. He collapsed on the floor,
wracked by uncontrollable, gutwrenching sobs.
Almost a day later, Tuvok had gotten worried enough to override the
ready room privacy codes. He barged in, looked around the wreckage, found the
Voyager's acting captain slumped in a pool of grief. Sat down beside him for
several minutes, face like stone. And then began to talk. Not about the ship
or his duty, but about Janeway, whom Tuvok had known better than anyone else on
the ship. How they met at the Academy, how he came to serve her, how unworthy
he felt when she called him her counsel. Chakotay listened silently, cradling
the data chip. He had thought that it must have been awful for the Vulcan to
deal with a human in such an emotional state, and only years later did he
realize that his own unrestrained mourning had gotten Tuvok off the hook: the
Vulcan had shared his anguish without having to express it. The mutual loss
forged an abiding bond which replaced the tension that had hovered between them
while they served under her.
Tom Paris had given the eulogy at the brief memorial service for the
crew. The lieutenant seemed nearly as devastated by the captain's loss as
the commander himself--she had been his mentor and his model, the one
person in his life to give him unqualified confidence--he coped by
escaping to his holodeck retreats whenever he could. It would probably
not have surprised Tom to learn that his commanding officer had a program
wearing Janeway's face...recoiling in disgust, Chakotay realized abruptly
what someone like Paris would assume if he knew about that. He forced his
mind back to the present, to his patient visitor. "That program," he
began with difficulty, nodding at the air where it had disappeared. "It's
not what you think. I would never have done what you probably
suspected--"
Mark raised his hand to cut him off. "You don't have to explain
anything to me." He reached into a pocket and pulled out a computer chip,
causing Chakotay to shudder involuntarily. "You've seen this before,
Commander," the other man said comfortingly. "It's the messages your crew sent
twenty years into your own past. They didn't reach us for more than a decade
after they were meant to, but they caught up with us finally. I thought you
might want to see some of them."
Chakotay found that he couldn't step forward, couldn't swallow, couldn't
even take the chip he so desperately wanted. "She said..." he rasped out
around the stone in his throat. "She said in her logs that she told
you..."
Mark lifted Chakotay's hand and pressed the chip into it, closing his
fingers around it. "It's not much. It might not be enough," the older
man said sadly. "Or it might be too much, I don't know. But your friends
out there--Tuvok, and that man waiting by the shuttle who told me where to
find you--they're very worried about you, Commander."
As Mark turned to go, the golden pile of fur rose from where it was
dozing to follow. "Should I take the dog with me? I brought him for you,
but if you'd rather pick him up later..."
Her puppy. He'd seen her with animals, she treated them like children.
Chakotay shook his head mutely for a moment, bending over to lift the
dog. "No, I'll bring him...are you going to beam down?" he asked
hoarsely.
Mark nodded. "I'll be at headquarters when you arrive." He left the
room quietly, leaving the Voyager's commander standing with the puppy in
his arms and the computer chip clenched in his fist.
Leavetaking Part 2
Chakotay waited several minutes, then walked slowly to the exit and down
the corridors of the ship. He had never really thought of it as his ship,
but as he moved toward the bridge with the dog squirming to get down, he
knew every inch of it--the changes they had made in the past many years,
the rooms altered as the crew planted gardens and had families and became
almost domesticated out in space. How frightening it must be for their
long-lost families, to arrive and meet the strangers they had become. He
had contacted no one yet; he had no idea where "home" to his people might
be now.
The turbolift swished open and took him to the top of the ship, where
the computer still worked. He inserted the chip, found the entry he was
looking for, put it on the main viewer.
The sight of Captain Kathryn Janeway's face knocked the breath out of
him. She looked different than he'd seen her these past many years, more
emotional than in any of the logs and simulations; her hair was in the
tight bun she'd worn when he first met her, not the looser one she'd
favored later on, and the strain of little sleep showed on her face. Her
voice was different too, tight with regret and longing; she spoke quickly,
as if afraid of wasting space.
She had left several messages. One for her parents, telling them that
she was exploring the unknown as they always taught her to do, they
shouldn't worry about her, she missed them, but the new crew was keeping
her busy and himself and Tuvok were keeping her sane. Another for a
science professor at the Academy who had apparently been a mentor of
sorts, telling him among other things that he never should have flunked
B'Elanna Torres. Yet another for the programmers of the emergency medical
holographic program, short and terse--she was aware that the Romulans
might screen the recordings.
Then one for Starfleet Command, mostly the details of the incident which
had brought them to the quadrant. He braced himself to hear her tell them
about his old ship, his crew, anything she had gleaned from him which
might serve Starfleet's interests, and was surprised instead to hear her
say, "Gentlemen, I know you're hoping to get a report from me about the
Maquis. But I can't help but feel that it would be a grave violation of
my crew's trust in me to discuss what we've learned from them, and I
intend to tell Lieutenant Tuvok not to pass on what he observed. I
realize that this may affect the balance of power in the Alpha Quadrant,
but I have confidence that Starfleet will do very well dealing with the
insurgence without us. I want to tell you that these renegades I was sent
to apprehend are some of the most loyal, committed individuals I have ever
had the honor of serving with. And I realize that it's easy for me to say
this--seventy thousand light years from the site of the carnage if war
should break out in the Demilitarized Zone--but I hope you will consider
carefully the demands of the settlers."
Janeway was wearing the same grim, determined expression that her
holoimage had faced him with earlier, but there was a light behind her
eyes which he'd almost forgotten--the expression of pleasure she got from
believing that she was doing the right thing, like when she had destroyed
the array. "In case I should not make it back with my crew, I have a few
additional requests," she added. "I must insist that all charges against
my Maquis crewmembers be dropped, regardless of the situation when they
arrive in the Alpha Quadrant. It seems clear that Commander Chakotay's
rank should be formally reinstated, and I recommend him highly for
decoration for service to this vessel and its crew. And, Admiral
Paris...I wanted you to know that I've given your son a field promotion,
he's become a fine helm officer. And he takes orders a damn sight better
than I did at his age." Her eyes sparkled gleefully as she reached to end
the recording.
A moment of darkness, and then she appeared again, looking nothing like
he'd ever seen her. Her hair was down, she was wearing a pink
nightgown--he could only see her upper body, her shoulders bare under the
tresses--Chakotay cursed himself momentarily for not making a copy of the
messages, and immediately cursed himself again for considering it.
"Mark," she was saying throatily. "By the time you see this recording,
I'm sure someone will have filled you in on where it came from, and how,
and why." She looked away and swallowed hard before continuing. "There
are a lot of things I should say to you. The most important one is, I
love you and I cherish the memories of our life together. But I can't
afford to daydream about returning to it any more than you can afford to
wait for me. I wish you every happiness. And don't worry about me.
There's a lot of work to be done on the ship, and some of these kids know
less than raw cadets, but my new first officer is taking care of them for
me, like you must be with the puppies. You'd like him, Mark, sometimes he
reminds me of you. Same smart-ass sense of humor and same committment to
hard-luck causes." She pressed her fingers to her lips, then to the
screen, blocking her own face, and it went blank again.
He did not realize that tears were rolling down his face until he felt
the puppy licking his cheeks, lapping at the salt. Chakotay pressed a
button, retrieved the chip, and then retreated to the chair in the center
of the bridge which had belonged to both of them. If she'd said anything
more it might have killed him, to have been handed proof that it was his
own fault he'd been too late recognizing what he was losing the day he
lost her. He'd recreated her form and manner, imbued it with as much
essence as he could summon, but the construct had only made him more aware
of the absence of her self. He felt her presence now as he had in those
first days after the accident, just outside his realm of being. Had he
chained her spirit to this ship, prevented it from moving on? Or was it
his own spirit that he had chained?
The puppy squirmed out of his hold and to the floor, sniffing. "Come
on, Bear," he said without thinking as he rose. Together they headed for the
turbolift. He was going to have to find Mark, down at HQ, to give him back the
chip before the debriefing. What a generous man. If only he had something to
offer in return...but Mark wouldn't need Janeway's old logs, he had a family.
Chakotay stood at the doors of the holodeck for a very long time.
Finally he entered the necessary commands and passed through the gate to
unreality. She was standing exactly where she'd been when Mark had made
her disappear, her expression neutral.
"I'm going to delete this program," he said. And then didn't. Moments
passed. The puppy sniffed in her direction and then ignored her.
"Just say the words." Her expression was steady, unsmiling. "It might
be more of a relief than you want to admit. The only reason I didn't tell
you to delete it earlier was that we had to get our ship through." We.
Our. Who was talking? After all those years, he'd brought her ship in,
his idealized image of her the beacon which lit his way home--driving all
distractions from his mind, keeping him focused on the crew which he'd
sworn to protect in her place. "I'm not sentient, you know," she smiled
wryly. "I seem that way to you because you programmed me. Right now
you're hearing a combination of Kathryn Janeway's logs and the ship's
computer. And yourself, Commander. Listen to yourself."
Himself. Should he give Janeway the credit for their homecoming, or
himself and this monster he'd created? The longer he looked at her
double, the more keenly he felt the absence of her soul. Her task was
complete now, as was his. He could stay here or walk to the transporter
room and dematerialize himself, going out as she had in a shower of
light. He knew how to end the saga, but not how to resolve it.
He looked at the holoimage. She stood still and silent, not quite
looking at him. Not quite there. Kathryn Janeway had said all she had to
say to him in this form. His eyes closed and he reached for her presence
inwardly. The puppy let out a low growl of surprise as Chakotay's spirit
moved outward, reaching. Giving. Finding. There in the ship and in
himself. Always. All this time.
"Computer, delete program," he said aloud.
Tom was still waiting, sitting on the floor of the shuttle bay against
some storage containers. Chakotay was surprised to see Tuvok there as
well. "I thought you might require assistance," the Vulcan reported
dispassionately.
"Yeah. I think you should hold the dog, Tuvok." The Vulcan lifted an
eyebrow at Paris, who grinned craftily. "So it doesn't jump on me while I'm
trying to navigate, and make me crash into Federation HQ. You know, all three
of us were suspected Maquis when we left. They'll never let you two get to
Vulcan if you don't convince them that we're on their side now."
"I'm not going to Vulcan." Chakotay spoke quietly, to Tuvok, who nodded
understanding. The first thing he wanted to do was to find Mark, thank
him properly, and ask him about Kathryn Janeway--the real Kathryn Janeway,
whom he'd all but forgotten. And then he was going to accept that damn
captaincy.
"You know, I sort of hate to leave this ship," Paris sighed. "You're
going to call me names, Tuvok, but I always felt like--well, like Janeway
was still here, watching over us somehow. Don't get upset, Chakotay, I
don't mean you weren't a great commanding officer, but she's the one who
gave me a chance and turned me into the person I am..."
"I understand exactly what you mean." Chakotay looked at Paris and a
decision began to form in his mind. "You know, I hear that they're going
to promote me. That ought to give me at least a little clout in
Starfleet, don't you think?"
Paris and Tuvok both looked startled as Chakotay stopped to think for a
moment. For the first time, he felt that the ship was his. Still full of
memories, and probably a relic by modern standards, but she had given it
to him, hadn't she, when she made him her second-in-command? Returning
the sacrifice he made for her--his own ship, all those years ago. Of
course she had believed him capable of getting the Voyager home; otherwise
she would never have entrusted it into his hands.
"What'd you have in mind?" Tom said finally.
"I've been thinking--it's probably good that they stripped out all the
refurbishments we made while we were off in space. But everything still
works, and it wouldn't be that hard to refit the engines. I don't like
what they're doing one bit, decommissioning this ship. She deserves
better than that."
Tuvok raised an eyebrow. "By 'she,' are you referring to Captain
Janeway?" he asked.
"I'm referring to her ship. My ship," he corrected himself.
"So..." Paris made a gesture for Chakotay to continue.
"So, if I get to choose my own command, are you interested in sitting in
the next chair? We know things none of those idiots at HQ have a handle
on. This assuming that they'll let a couple of old men crap around the
quadrant."
Paris laughed in surprise, at Chakotay and at Tuvok's almost-disgusted
expression. The three men boarded the shuttle for Earth.
