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Chapter Text

“You were right to come here,” Kolopak says.

Chakotay blinks and looks down. Kolopak smiles up at him from under his hat brim. It’s been many years, but every detail is as crisp as the last time he saw him: weather-worn bronze skin, thin lips, waves of steel gray hair gone wispy around the temples. Only this can’t be the real Kolopak, because Kolopak never had to look up to meet his son’s eye—and he never, ever admitted when he was right.

“You’ve grown,” not-Kolopak says. “In height, and in wisdom.”

This is a dream, Chakotay thinks.

Kolopak’s smile widens. He reaches out to grasp Chakotay by the chin, turning his face this way and that. In Maya he says, “You look more like your mother now. I’m glad.”

In the waking world, Chakotay’s own Maya is halting and inelegant, but in his dream the words flow like water. “I try to live in a way that honors you both,” he says, “though I don’t always succeed.” He leans back to take in the dense green canopy above them, the hot air thick with humidity and birdsong. “Dream-spirit, why have you brought me here?”

“You were right to come here,” Kolopak says again.

“Which here do you mean? My body is in the Delta Quadrant, but this looks like Chetumal.” When his father doesn’t respond, Chakotay takes a breath, trying to keep his teenaged frustration at bay. He wants to think he’s grown in patience, too. “What am I meant to do here?”

Kolopak has stepped away to examine a nearby tree trunk, which is entangled in a thick mat of creeping vines. Without turning he says, “Not I. We.” 

“We as in you and I? Or…”

For a long time, there’s only the high-pitched, chittering whistle of x’kau. Then Kolopak plucks something from the vine, turns around, and holds it up for Chakotay to see. It’s a small flower, shaped like a lotus in exquisite miniature, pure white except for a circlet of red petals at the center, like a cup of human blood. It’s beautiful, and Chakotay has never seen its like, not on Earth or on Dorvan V or anywhere in the Delta Quadrant.

“What is this?”

“A gift,” Kolopak says. “One you will receive, and one you will give.” He pauses, looking at Chakotay through strangely glittering eyes. “Do you remember what I always told you, about the difference between a good warrior and a great one?”

“A good warrior fights against his enemies. A great warrior fights for those he loves.”

Kolopak nods in satisfaction. “You are a great warrior, Chakotay. When the time comes, you will know what to do.”

Now his father is holding out the flower, as if to say take it. The inner ring of red petals seems to glow redder, throbbing with a power Chakotay can feel under his skin. But just as he touches it, the birds stop singing. He blinks again and—in a flash—Kolopak has vanished. He calls out to him, in Maya and in English, but now he’s alone, and the forest is dead quiet except for a low, pulsating thrum.

Impulse engines.

The thought rings through his dream like a gong. With a start, Chakotay wakes in his cabin, body chilled with sweat, his fingers curled around empty air.

Chapter Text

Voyager drops out of warp at the jagged edge of an asteroid belt.

Chakotay grits his teeth in the split second beforehand. They’re cutting it a bit close for his taste, but Tom swore he could do it, and the captain trusts Tom. Chakotay, for his part, trusts the captain—so by the transitive property, he supposes he also trusts Tom. And he has to admit, the man can fly.

“Boom,” Tom says, slapping at the conn in triumph. “Warp five and only a half-k of drift. Let’s see God himself top that!”

“At least maybe your god would file his shift reports on time,” Chakotay says from his command chair. He hits his combadge before Tom can snipe back. “Bridge to Janeway.”

There’s a slight pause before she responds, out of breath. “Janeway here.”

“We’ve arrived at Delta-Eighty-Two-Epsilon, just outside the disk. Orders?”

“All stop,” comes her reply. “Have Tuvok run every scan he can without announcing ourselves to the whole system. I’ll be right there.”

Chakotay taps into his console, initiating the all-stop, then stands to help Tuvok at tactical. Five minutes later, the portside doors whisk open.

“Captain on the bridge,” Tuvok says.

As if the force of nature named Kathryn Janeway has ever needed an introduction. Everyone stands a little straighter as she strides toward tactical, her gait brisk, rolling her shoulder to limber up a stiff muscle. When she gets closer, Chakotay can see that that her skin is flushed with exertion, and she has the peculiar neutral smell of a sonic shower.

He smiles sidelong. “B’Elanna talk you into hoverball again?”

She snorts, massaging at her neck with both hands. “I never learn. Do me a favor, Commander. Next time she challenges me, don’t let me take the bait. Consign me to the brig if you have to.”

“Commit mutiny. Understood.”

She laughs in earnest. As usual, the sound of it squeezes at something in Chakotay’s chest, and as usual, he tries to ignore it. When he looks at her again, she’s peering into the console, her command mask back in place.

“What’s the situation, gentlemen?” she asks.

On one of the tactical readouts, Tuvok has called up a three-dimensional map of the star system Delta-Eighty-Two-Epsilon. He presses a few buttons to apply a sensor overlay, and the map lights up with a dense cloud of white dots, most clustered in a band around the system’s outskirts. “As you will see here,” he says, “the circumstellar disk does indeed contain rich dilithium deposits. However, sensors also detected inorganic energy signatures”—he toggles the overlay again, and two red dots pop up closer to the star—“here, and here. In short, the system appears to be inhabited.”

Chakotay looks from Tuvok to the captain, his all-too-familiar heartache displaced by an unease he can’t identify. “I’ve never heard of a red dwarf that could support advanced life. That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

“Unusual, but not impossible,” Kathryn says. With practiced motions, she swipes more data onto a neighboring screen and scrolls through the readings. “Red dwarf stars are so cool that planets in the habitable zone are often tidally locked, meaning one side effectively broils in eternal daylight.”

“And the other freezes in eternal night,” Chakotay finishes. “Not very cozy, even for amoeba.”

“Precisely. But in theory, if a tidally locked planet somehow held on to its atmosphere, the terminator region between the hemispheres could be habitable. And moons—any moon tidally locked to its primary would experience normal solar cycles.”

Tuvok inclines his head in acknowledgement. “You have, as I believe you humans say, ‘hit the nail upon the head,’ Captain.” On the map display, he zooms in closer and points to one of the red dots, the one further from the sun; at this scale, it’s clear that the dot is orbiting a larger body. “Energy signatures consistent with civilization are concentrated on this moon, designated Delta-Eighty-Two-Epsilon-Beta.” Then he recenters the map on the sunward dot, alone in tight orbit around the star. “There are also significant, though less extensive, energy signatures along the twilight zone of this planet, designated Delta-Eighty-Two-Epsilon-Gamma.”

“Fascinating,” Kathryn breathes. She gives herself a small shake. “Or it would be, if we were here to do an exoplanetary survey. As it stands, this just complicates matters. Thoughts, Chakotay?”

“I don’t see any evidence that the dilithium is being used by the people who live here. No warp distortions, no traces of mining in the belt, no indication that they’ve even made it out this far. But…” Chakotay combs through the readouts, searching for something to justify his misgivings. In the end, he decides on honesty. “My instincts are telling me to be cautious, Captain. We should learn more about these people before we do anything that could risk contact.”

She agrees with a curt nod. “Do it. Tuvok, I want you and Ensign Kim to run passive scans on all local transmissions. Comms, broadcasts, satellite pings—whatever’s out there, I want to know about it.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Chakotay, schedule a senior staff meeting for this time tomorrow. In the meantime, make sure the raw data gets to the right departments for analysis. Forward anything astronomical to my terminal.”

“Right away,” Chakotay says. But for a second he lets his eyes linger on her back, the proud flick of auburn hair as she settles into the center seat. Then he gets to work, swallowing down his unnamable apprehension; down, down, with all his other unnamable feelings.

His people have a saying: knowledge is a torch to hold back the shadows of fear. It might be the only piece of ancestral wisdom he’s never once questioned. But the more Chakotay learns about the inhabitants of Delta-Eighty-Two-Epsilon, the stranger he feels, each new bit of information jangling in his memory like a loose flux capacitor. An old Earth people, not his, have a name for this feeling. Déjà vu.

What’s stranger is that he can think of no reason why he should feel this way. He’s studied hundreds of cultures in his lifetime, and nothing about the Anthrisi stands out as particularly remarkable.

He says as much at the senior staff meeting, as he stands at the briefing room viewscreen and cycles through videos of gray-skinned, slim-boned humanoids going about their lives: dancing in brightly colored kirtles and flower garlands, firing projectile weapons over stretches of jungle, bowing at each other with graceful, sweeping gestures, thin hands clasped at their chests. He stops at a still image of an Anthrisi atop an elevator lift, brushing the nose cone of a spacecraft with a palm frond. The leaves are an unusual purple and the craft rudimentary in design, but there’s no mistaking a christening ceremony.

“The Anthrisi are a typical Class-B civilization,” Chakotay says. “Post-industrial, pre-warp, with limited interplanetary capabilities based on nuclear-thermal propulsion. They originated on this moon, which they call Anthris, and began colonizing Oneiros, the inner planet, around a hundred years ago. It started as a small mining colony, but the population has since exploded.”

He clicks through a few more slides. The Anthrisi in these photos are dressed in coarser, drabber clothing, and the structures are obviously prefabs, dingy beige plastic coated in red dirt. The light is also noticeably weaker, and tinged orange—an artifact of the planet’s tidal lock, which limits its habitable zone to the borderland between its day and nightsides.

Kathryn frowns at the screen but says nothing. Seven of Nine, seated to her left, raises a frigid eyebrow. “The Borg are aware of Species One-Nine-One-Five,” she declares. “They were evaluated soon after they achieved spaceflight and deemed unworthy of assimilation at that time. It is evident that their social organization remains crude and inefficient.”

“Anthrisi society is stratified by class,” Chakotay allows. “Oneiros has long been a dumping ground for the home world’s undesirables. The demographics skew poorer and younger, though they seem tight-knit.”

Kathryn finally speaks up. “They have a caste system?”

“Technically, no. Governance is democratic, but in practice the elite on Anthris hold all the real power.“

“I’ll grab my monocle and top-hat,” Tom mutters aside to Harry. “We can haggle for the dilithium.”

“Try robes and a hood,” Chakotay says. He pages through images until he finds the one he’s looking for: a dozen or so Anthrisi in belted cassocks, hands folded in that distinctive bowing gesture, ringed round a shrine bedecked in flowers. Though he’s seen it many times by now, something about this image still prickles at his nape, and he still can’t put his finger on what. “The Anthrisi are very devout,” he goes on. “Some kind of animistic polytheism, as far as I can tell. Their clerics have a lot of sway, which the less savory among them use to stir up sectarian conflict. Anthrisi on the home world think the colonists are all heretics, and vice versa.”

“Great,” Tom says. “Oligarchy and theocracy. Add in a dash of patriarchy and we’ve got ourselves a trifecta.”

“Since you bring it up, their family structure is traditionally patrilineal. You know those sectarian conflicts I mentioned? Gender roles are another point of contention.”

A disgusted sound from Seven of Nine. Next to her, Kathryn rises from her chair, fingers interlaced around her coffee mug, and starts pacing along the viewport. “I’m beginning to get the picture, Commander. This system is a powder keg, anything could set it off.” She paces another length, then turns to address B’Elanna. “Just how badly do we need that dilithium?”

“Captain, I’m running out of synonyms for critical. Replicated crystals work in a pinch, but at this point over five percent of the converter matrix is synthetic. I’ve got technicians pulling double shifts to keep the warp core stable.”

“Their hard work is appreciated, Lieutenant. Chakotay, allocate extra replicator credit to the affected crew.” She glances wistfully into her coffee. “Dock mine if you have to,” she adds. “Tuvok, can we collect the dilithium without alerting the Anthrisi?”

Tuvok glowers around the table—which, knowing Tuvok, could mean anything. “Anthrisi geospatial intelligence operations are restricted to the inner planets. However, circumstellar disks are, by their nature, unpredictable. Any activity there may prove disruptive enough to attract attention.”

Kathryn waves that off. “It’s all academic anyway. Without that dilithium, we’re dead in the water, figuratively speaking.” She halts at the head of the table, and her voice hardens in decision. “That’s why we’re going to proceed with mining, but we’re going to do it quietly. Harry, identify the five largest deposits in the belt, and Tom—move us to whichever one’s closest, one-eighth impulse. Await further orders at your duty stations. Dismissed.”

A chorus of ayes and the scraping of chairs as the senior staff file out of the room. Chakotay, still standing by the viewscreen, doesn’t join them.

“Come on, let’s have it.”

“I would love to. What is it?”

Kathryn looks over at him from the window, and for the first time today relaxes into something approaching a smile. “You have an opinion, Commander. You think I’m acting rashly. You would urge me to find an alternative dilithium source, even if we have to limp there at impulse, et cetera, et cetera. Do I have it about right?”

“Not quite,” Chakotay says, as he draws up alongside her. Voyager is coming about, and out the viewport a sea of asteroids wink in the sunlight, like shards of glass mid-shatter. “You said it yourself, we need that dilithium. You made the only choice you could.”

“But?”

“But, I can’t help but see this from an indigenous perspective. This is their space. We should be asking permission.”

To her credit, Kathryn doesn’t scoff at the idea, though her expression grows troubled. “In a perfect world, we would. But contacting the Anthrisi would be a blatant violation of the Prime Directive, not to mention totally unethical given the volatility of their society. Can you imagine what the revelation of other intelligent species would do to them?”

“I don’t need to imagine it,” he says. “There are plenty of examples from history. Just look at Sigma Iotia, or Malcor III. Contact never goes by the book, however much Starfleet tries to dress it up in protocol and procedure.” He lapses into silence after that, carding mentally through more case studies. Outside, some distance off the port bow, a small asteroid has clipped into a larger one; the collision scatters shuttle-sized fragments toward the hull, where they bounce harmlessly off Voyager’s deflector shields.

He turns to find Kathryn eying him with open concern. “There’s something else on your mind.”

Trust, whispers a voice in his head. “I’ve been dreaming about my father,” he says out loud.

A pause. “Go on.”

“It’s always the same dream. He and I are working a dig site on Earth, and he tells me I’ve come to the right place. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what he meant, but now I think he was talking about this place. Anthris.”

“And you think these dreams are, what? A message from your father? Your…” Her forehead wrinkles almost imperceptibly. “…Deceased father?”

To someone who knows the captain as well as Chakotay does, her skepticism is as plain as day—but so is her voracious curiosity, and like a signal fire, it beckons him onward. “I think it could be a message," he says, "though not necessarily from Kolopak.”

“Explain.”

“My people believe that there are forces all around us, energies, living bodies of knowledge beyond the physical world. They can’t be scanned with a tricorder, but without them we couldn’t exist, and they couldn’t exist without us. And if you listen the right way, you can hear them. They speak to us in the language of the universe.”

Kathryn shoots him an arch look over her mug. “Mathematics is the language of the universe, Chakotay.”

“What makes you think the spirits can’t do math?” he asks, which makes her chuckle. On a whim, he takes her free hand and presses it to the viewport, palm down. “Take this pane of transparent aluminum. You can’t see it, can you? Yet you know it’s there.”

“I know because I can feel it,” she says. “The nerve endings in my hand send electrical impulses to my thalami, and my somatosensory cortex interprets the input as texture, temperature, and pressure.”

A moment passes in which he’s intensely aware of the texture and temperature of her hand under his, the red curve of a smile playing on her lips. Then he lets go to point to the asteroid field outside. “What about the dilithium deposits? You can’t see or touch them, but you’re just as sure that they’re there. How do you know?”

“Voyager has specialized sensors to detect dilithium. I rely on the instruments.”

“As do I. But there are many kinds of instruments, each with its own applications. Your bodily senses are instruments. Voyager’s gravimetric arrays are instruments.” He grins and leans in a little, like he’s letting her in on a secret. “So are visions, and dreams.”

Kathryn chuckles again, shaking her head, and starts toward the briefing room door. “I’m afraid in this case, Chakotay, seeing is believing. Now if your father—spirit, what have you—could offer some more practical advice, I might be convinced.”

“I’ll be sure to pass on your request the next time I see him,” Chakotay says, and follows her laughter over the threshold.

But Chakotay doesn’t dream that night. That night sleep is elusive, and he’s still tossing and turning when his cabin lights spin up to a pulsing yellow. “Commander Chakotay,” chirps the computer, “you are needed on the bridge.”

A bedraggled Harry Kim snaps to attention when Chakotay steps into the turbolift, still fastening his pips. “Any idea what this is about, sir?”

“No clue. Flying solo this evening, Ensign?”

Harry looks down at his sooty leather jacket, reddens, and starts wriggling out of the sleeves as they hustle the last few meters to the bridge. “Sometimes I like to play as Captain Proton. Please don’t tell Tom.”

“Don’t tell Tom what?” Tom asks from the helm. “Hey, is that my—”

“Stay on course,” Kathryn barks. She’s standing behind him, hands on her hips, wearing a turtleneck and no jacket. Chakotay jogs down the ramp to meet her. “Beta shift just sounded the alarm,” she says distractedly. “An asteroid in the belt has been knocked out of orbit, it’s headed toward the colony planet.”

“Oneiros,” Chakotay murmurs. He recalls his father’s words, and his stomach churns with sick realization. Not an invitation, he thinks. A warning. “Did we cause this?”

Kathryn turns to him now, face pale and grim. “I don’t know—there are too many variables. It’s possible we destabilized something and triggered a cascade, or it could be completely random, nothing to do with us.”

“Captain,” Harry says, “the body is in visual range.”

“On screen.”

A beat while the bridge crew takes it in. The wayward asteroid is rotating on its axis, end over end, shedding plumes of white dust as it hurtles toward the unsuspecting Anthrisi.

Chakotay swivels toward Tuvok at the tactical station. “How long until it hits? And how bad will it be?”

“Impact in twenty-one hours, seven minutes. The effects will be…catastrophic.”

“Over my dead body,” Kathryn says. “How long do we have to divert it? Anyone?”

After a moment’s pause, Seven says, “The window for a safe deflection maneuver has passed. If you are willing to disregard Voyager’s approved operational specifications, deceleration may commence within the next sixteen minutes.”

“Thank you. Time to intercept?”

“Just under two minutes at max impulse,” answers Tom.

Tuvok speaks again, calm yet urgent. “Captain, I would remind you that intervention will almost certainly reveal our presence to the Anthrisi. In the event that we did not set the asteroid in motion, interference may constitute a breach of the Prime Directive.”

She wavers, but only for a second. “Let them debate it at my court martial. Seven, tell engineering to prepare reverse thrusters. Harry, ready the tractor beam and wait for my signal.”

“Aye, Captain,” they both say. Harry punches in a few commands, then looks up from his readouts. “We’re in tractor range.”

As one, Chakotay and Kathryn retreat to the command chairs. She hits her combadge three times—“this is the captain,” she says, “all hands brace”—and then once more to close the comm. “Engage starboard tractor beam, bearing...ninety-three-mark-twelve. Helm, hard aport.”

The deck bucks beneath them. “Got it!” Harry calls out.

“Yeah, and now it’s towing us!” Tom shouts.

“Steady as she goes, Mr. Paris!”

There’s nothing steady about it. Chakotay holds tight to his shuddering armrests as he monitors the ship’s systems from his terminal, shunting the relevant data one terminal over—shear stress tolerances, hull integrity, fuel reserves. Next to him, the captain taps feverishly into her own console, calculating dynamic course headings that she in turn feeds to the helm. All the while, Voyager jerks on the beam like a climber dangling from a mountain, rattling itself apart joint from joint in a mad effort to move the immovable. Secondary thrusters burn out, one after another; debris strikes take the starboard nacelle offline; three decks switch to emergency life support when one of the conduit banks blows.

But slowly, by fractions of a degree, the asteroid’s trajectory begins to arc sunward. The mountain is moving.

Because of course it is, Chakotay thinks as he finally looks up from his terminal. She’s wiping at her brow, sucking in a breath before she dives back into the numbers. It occurs to him that he’s never yet seen the miracle that Kathryn Janeway can’t pull off.

Within two hours, Tuvok announces that Oneiros is no longer in the asteroid’s direct path. Another hour, just to be safe, and Kathryn orders Tom to throttle down Voyager’s engines, leaving Chakotay to tease it onto a collision course with the sun while she helps the engineers assess the damage. Ten hours later, Chakotay hands the bridge to gamma shift, fishes the captain out of Jefferies tube three, herds her to her quarters, then falls into his own bed next door, seeking clarity and finding none. He’s too exhausted to dream.

Four hours’ time sees them both back on the bridge. There, they cut the tractor beam and watch the asteroid miss Oneiros by thirty-thousand kilometers: just far enough away to leave the planet’s delicate atmosphere unscathed, but close enough for the local Anthrisi to notice.

Naturally, Tom is the first to break the silence. “Now what?”

Before anyone can answer, a panel lights up at Harry’s comms station. “Captain,” Harry says. “I think…I think they’re trying to hail us.”

Kathryn looks at Chakotay in mute appeal. He takes a step toward her. “We’re in uncharted waters, Captain,” he says under his breath. “Forget the Starfleet protocols, you have to do what you feel is right. Not in the abstract—here and now.”

She grimaces, weighing her options, then tidies her jacket with a firm tug on the hem. “Ensign Kim, open a channel. All frequencies.”

The viewscreen goes staticky for a few seconds before resolving into the image of a willowy Anthrisi woman in rough-spun homesteading garb. She’s hunched at a workstation in what appears to be a control room; five or six more Anthrisi are crowded around her, gaping into the camera.

Kathryn smiles reassuringly, without a hint of her earlier indecision. “I’m Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager. We mean you no harm. To whom am I speaking?” The woman’s response is garbled as the feed cuts in and out. “My apologies, I can’t hear you. Do you consent to speak face-to-face? We have the technology to transport you to our ship, it’s perfectly safe.”

Her Yes comes through clear enough. Kathryn nods to Harry, and a column of light flares on the bridge and solidifies into the Anthrisi woman. She’s even slighter in the flesh than on screen, with a look of dazed wonderment on her lavender-gray face.

“Welcome aboard,” Kathryn says.

With a soft gasp, the woman clasps her hands at her chest and ducks her head. 

Kathryn’s smile grows taut. She moves closer, her own hands held out in the universal sign of peaceful intent, but the woman only folds more tightly into herself. “There’s no need to be afraid. No one’s going to hurt you—”

“Kathryn,” Chakotay says, checking her with a touch. He knows now what they’ve waded into, and uncharted waters might be the understatement of the century. “This woman isn’t afraid,” he says. “She’s praying.”

Chapter Text

“A storm is coming,” Kathryn says.

Chakotay opens his eyes on a latticework of green and blue. He’s lying on his back under a tree; the patches of sky he can see through its branches are clear, almost iridescent, and the wind smells of fresh pine pitch. New Earth.

“Not a plasma storm,” she adds, as if in answer to his thoughts. “Just a plain old thunderstorm.”

There’s a rasp of skin on bark, a thud as her feet hit the dirt. He smiles. “One of these days you’re going to sprain an ankle. I’ll have no choice but to carry you back home.”

“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t enjoy that.”

“I would. It’s the bedrest after that I’m worried about. You’ll be climbing the walls in five minutes.”

Kathryn laughs and flops down next to him, twirling a bit of greenery over her head. Her hair is longer than it’s been in years, coiled in a loose braid that snakes around her shoulders and through the grass. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Chakotay looks up again and notices that the sky is suddenly clouded.

Doubt wedges its fingers in the cracks in the illusion, but the dream holds. “You aren’t real,” he says.

She doesn’t speak for a while. Then she rolls over and props herself up on a palm, so she’s looking down at him from above. “What is real? Does the fact that I exist only in your head make me not real? When I do this”—here she tickles at his bare forearm with the thing she’s holding—“doesn’t your brain tell you that you’re feeling it?”

“I meant, you aren’t really her.”

“Well. You have me there.”

Her voice is dry as tinder, and so like Kathryn—his Kathryn, the real one—that Chakotay can’t help the electric thrill that runs through him at the sound of it. Lightning crashes again, louder this time. She’s still bending over him, and he wants badly to make her laugh again, but her attention has already skittered elsewhere; she’s fiddling with something over his left shoulder. He cranes his neck and sees that it’s a straggling scrap of vine, flecked here and there with clumps of dark green leaves and white, cup-shaped flowers.

Not all white, he thinks. He refocuses his eyes. Each flower, otherwise spotless ivory, hides a vicious red dot at its center.

Chakotay sits bolt upright, seizing her by the arms. “What is this?” he demands. “Who are you?”

Another thunderclap, and the sky splits open. The rain falls fast and warm. Through the haze, the woman who isn’t Kathryn Janeway watches him. Eventually, after what feels like an age, she picks a flower off the vine, reaches across the charged, steaming space between them, and skims its velvet petals down the side of his face, tattoo to chin.

His grip loosens. “What are you trying to show me?” he asks, softer.

“Nothing you don’t already know, Chakotay,” she says.

She leans in until her forehead is resting against his, and he lets her do it. “You aren’t real,” he whispers again. But she’s right, it feels real—rainwater beading off his nose, the taper of her throat under his thumb, every agonizing detail conjured like a holo-novel by his traitorous brain. And when she pushes him back down, underneath her in the mud, and kisses him with lips he’s never kissed in real life, there’s nothing illusory about the need that sparks in his belly, the sensation of being set on fire from the inside out.

The words drift out of his memory. I know because I can feel it. Texture, temperature, pressure. She takes him slowly, silent as a shadow until her breath grows ragged and she cries out—a long, low, broken sound that pulls him right over the edge after her.

Even then, in the quivering wake of his release, the dream holds. Chakotay’s vision has always been strong. It’s only when she collapses against him, cold and boneless, that it begins to falter. 

“Kathryn?” he says, pulse beating in his ears. When she doesn’t respond, he eases them both up, turns her face to the sky, smooths back her soaked hair. Her eyes are filmed over, her lips limned with blood. Frantic, he shakes her hard and rakes his hands down her torso, feeling for injury, but her skin is slick and her limbs are already stiffening, and—spirits, there’s blood everywhere—

Chakotay flails awake in the darkness of his cabin. His sheets are damp, and for a long time afterward, his mouth tastes of copper.

Chapter Text

On the colony world of Oneiros, the sun is a fixed landmark. Here, at the largest settlement on the planet, it’s a fiery red semicircle slashed across the horizon. The yellow hills are covered in scrub brush, and the Anthrisi have used adobe to build out from the original prefabs, so the town looks like something out of an old Earth serial. Westerns, they called them: the kind where men who look like Tom Paris ride around on horses and shoot at men who look like Chakotay.

Chakotay tries not to think about that as he steps out of the temple and into the settlement’s central square. Though he regrets the circumstances that brought him to this place, he’s grateful for the chance to experience its eerie beauty. He likes what he’s seen of the people, too. He appreciates how they welcomed him, an outsider, into one of their most sacrosanct spaces, how they seem to care about the collective good.

The square is a case in point. On Oneiros, UV light is a public utility, distributed for free in specially lit gardens that dim and brighten on a twenty-two hour cycle. They’ve become natural gathering places over the years—so the locals tell him—and this one is by far the busiest. On most days, at about this time, the earthen floor would be mobbed with off-shift beryllium miners, gossiping old retirees, hordes of laughing, screaming schoolchildren.

Today, though, the gardens are subdued. There are plenty of Anthrisi around, but most go about their business in reverent silence. No one dawdles or speaks too loudly, and only a few sneak shy peeks at the red-haired alien woman standing under one of the lamp arrays, waving a box at a potted plant.

Kathryn’s relief is palpable. “Chakotay. I was about to call down a search party.”

“Apologies for the wait, Captain. Apparently meetings run long regardless of species. Have you learned anything out here?”

“About their technology? Sure. I learned that they can program these lamps to emit different spectral patterns depending on what compounds they want the plants to produce. Ingenious, really.” She holsters her tricorder and turns in a slow circle, taking in the empty benches and deserted walkways around them. “About the people? Not so much. They won’t even make eye contact with me, except the children. And while they’re very adorable, they aren’t exactly informative.”

As if summoned, a small figure steals into Chakotay’s periphery. An Anthrisi…girl, if he had to guess, with dark gray skin and sweet, doll-like features. She’s clutching a motley spray of flowers picked from the garden, and she dances from foot to foot, torn between curiosity and terror.

Kathryn spots her, crouches down on one knee, and says, “Hello there.”

The Anthrisi girl lets out a squeak and sidles closer to Chakotay, fisting a hand in his pant leg. Kathryn looks up at him like, You see what I’m talking about?

He nudges the girl forward. “It’s all right,” he says to her. “She won’t bite.”

The girl hops once, twice, then sticks her arm straight out in front of her. Kathryn brightens. “Are those for me?” she asks. She brings the little bouquet to her nose and breathes in, eyes half-closed. The simple pleasure of it makes Chakotay smile in sympathy. “They’re lovely,” she says.

A deep purple flush spreads across the girl’s cheeks. She bows over her tiny hands and takes off running, leaving the two of them alone in the middle of the square.

Kathryn rises and dusts herself off. “At least they like you,” she says, a bit tart.

Chakotay grazes his fingertips against the bundle of flowers she’s holding, charmed by its riot of textures and colors—spiny vermilion and papery violet and fuzzy cream. “They do like me, in a friendly sort of way. They revere you. They just aren’t sure how to act around you. Unsurprising, since most of them think their gods sent you here to rescue them.”

Her eyes sharpen. “We might very well be the reason they needed rescuing in the first place. Didn’t you explain that to the clerics?”

“Of course. But I couldn’t say for certain, because we don’t know ourselves. I wasn’t about to lie to them.”

“So instead you let them think I’m their guardian angel?”

“I didn’t let them think anything,” he clarifies. “I was at the conclave as a witness. I shared Voyager’s mission logs with them and they formed their own interpretation of events, as is their right.”

She kneads at her forehead and sighs. “And what interpretation is that, Commander?”

Chakotay hesitates. The passing Anthrisi are too respectful, or cowed, to stare, but he can sense their interest, and he's served under the captain long enough to know that she's not going to take this well. Without prompting, his mind flashes back to that afternoon by the viewport, the warm press of her hand under his. I’m afraid in this case, Chakotay, seeing is believing.

If I can just get her to see, he thinks.

He steps in closer and lowers his voice. “There’s a prophecy, in one of their oldest scriptures. It speaks of a great conflagration that will threaten to engulf the world, and a brave and powerful being that will descend from the stars to stop it—‘swallow the fire’ is the literal translation. According to the prophecy, this being will appear to die in the act, only to later walk among them, and help them usher in a new golden age.”

Kathryn blanches whiter with every word. “They can’t possibly believe…”

“They just saw a woman from outside their solar system deflect an asteroid that would’ve destroyed their planet. They saw pieces of her ship tear off, and yet here she is. From their point of view, it makes sense.”

She gapes at him for a few seconds, speechless. Then her gaze zips across the square, in the direction of the temple. “I have to fix this,” she says.

Well—let the record state that he tried. 

She slaps her combadge. “Janeway to bridge.”

“This is Kim. Go ahead, Captain.”

“Ensign, the Commander and I are finished here. Two to beam up.”

Chakotay steps into her sightline. “Captain—”

“Aye aye. We’re still down one Heisenberg compensator, so the system’s laggy. Stand by for transport.”

“Captain,” he says again. “I know you didn’t intend for this to happen, but it’s happened, and running away isn’t going to change that. These people look to you, you have a responsibility toward them.”

“What do you think I’m doing if not fulfilling my responsibility to these people?” she asks, folding her arms tight in front of her. The movement sends a shower of multicolored petals fluttering, unheeded, to the ground. “The most responsible thing to do now is to default to standard diplomatic procedure. As soon as we’re aboard, we’re going to submit a petition for dilithium mining rights to the proper authorities on Anthris. The proper secular authorities.”

Chakotay bristles at her emphasis. “What about the prophecy? Their religious beliefs?”

“I’ll prepare a statement about the asteroid incident for general broadcast. We just have to hope that’s enough to nip this prophecy nonsense in the bud.”

“Spirits, Kathryn, you talk about them like they’re a bunch of superstitious primitives. This isn’t some factual misunderstanding you can clear up in a statement. This is an article of faith. Just because you don’t believe in anything—”

Kathryn cuts him off with a look. “On the contrary, Commander, I believe in all kinds of things. I believe in the scientific method. I believe in the Prime Directive. More importantly, I believe in the chain of command, which leaves the final decision to me. Do I make myself clear?”

Her voice is glacial, her expression shuttered. Thus far and no further. “Crystal clear,” he says. “I think leaving now is a mistake.”

“Noted.” She takes a wooden step back. “Prepare for beam up.”

Only then does Chakotay notice the telltale itch of the transporter beam, fizzing in his bones. Ka’a’k’ate, Oneiros, he thinks, more sorry now than angry. He would have liked one last look at the sunset.

“Anyone sitting here?”

Chakotay looks up from his PADD to see B’Elanna Torres, wearing yellow cover-alls and a preoccupied scowl. Before he can say anything, she lets her tray clatter onto the table, drops into the seat opposite him, and attacks her leola root hash like she’s trying to skewer a glob of fresh gagh.

“Good morning to you, too,” he says. He takes a sip from his mug of deka tea. “You know, I’ve found eating is more pleasant when I chew the food.”

“No time,” B’Elanna says between bites. “Demagnetizers on the injector ports keep jamming. Most days I’d just have Vorik babysit them, but he’s up to his pointy ears in engine repairs. Him and everyone else.”

Chakotay consults his PADD and taps in a few commands. “Thorpe is on duty. I’ll reassign him to the engine room until you get it sorted out.”

“Thorpe? Isn’t he in astrometrics?”

“He retrained mid-career. His first posting was in Operations, enlisted man.”

“Huh,” she says, chewing at a more sedate pace. “I had no idea. Thanks.” She jiggles her fork and eyes the place setting in front of him, empty except for the tea. “Want some of my hash? It’s only a little gloopy today.”

“Appetizing, but I’ll pass. I’m not hungry.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes while B’Elanna eats. Chakotay is usually comfortable with silence, but he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and this morning he finds he can’t focus on anything so trivial as a nonessential supplies audit. When he catches himself rereading the same line item for the third time, he gives up and tosses the PADD aside.

“B’Elanna, do you believe in Sto’Vo’Kor?”

She freezes, fork hovering in midair. “Not really, no.”

“I do,” he says. She opens her mouth, but he answers the question before she can ask it. “Not the way you’re thinking. I don’t believe I’m going to Sto’Vo’Kor after I die. I don’t know if you are, either. I don’t know what or where it is, or if it’s even a place one can go to. All I know is that the Klingon have believed in its existence for millennia. Who am I to tell those billions of people that they’re wrong?”

B’Elanna snickers at that. “That’s just common sense. Never tell a Klingon they’re wrong, not unless you want your ass handed to you.” She prods at her food a couple times, then sets her fork down. “Where’s this coming from, big guy?”

Chakotay glances at the tables around them. It’s too early for the alpha shift rush, and no one is in earshot. “It’s complicated,” he begins. “The gist is that the Anthrisi have an old prophecy—”

“Oh, shit, that’s real? I thought for sure Tom was just screwing with me. They really think Janeway’s a god?”

“How the hell did Paris hear about it? No, never mind—just tell him to keep it to himself, all right? And no, they don’t think she’s a god. The colonists on Oneiros believe their gods worked through her, that she was brought here to help them.”

“Ghuy’cha,” B’Elanna says, with an incredulous laugh. When she notices he isn’t laughing with her, her face goes slack. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. You believe it, too!”

“Of course not,” Chakotay says quickly. A little too quickly, judging by her reaction. “I don’t know,” he adds, shifting in his seat. “They aren’t my gods, so it isn’t my place to say. But I’ve been having these dreams. Vivid ones, almost every night. They started right before we arrived in system, and they haven’t let up since. If anything they’ve become darker, more—violent.”

As he speaks, the ridges on B’Elanna’s forehead inch higher. “You tell the old bat’leth about it?”

“B’Elanna.”

“Ugh, fine. Have you told the captain about your dreams?”

“I tried to. She asked me if I thought they were some kind of message, but that was before the asteroid. At the time, I wasn’t totally sure I hadn’t lost my mind.”

“And now?” B’Elanna presses.

“Now, I think too much has happened for this all to be just coincidence. I know they’re trying to tell me something. I just don’t know…”

Anything else, Chakotay finishes inwardly. His gaze slides toward the nearest viewport, which looks out onto Oneiros’s dayside. He had expected it to be scalded and barren, but thanks to quirks in the planet’s orbit, he can’t see the surface at all: most of the hemisphere is blanketed in swirling blue clouds, the land underneath them scoured to bedrock by a constant, continent-spanning torrential rainstorm.

Ironic, isn’t it? Kathryn had mused, as they stood side-by-side on the observation deck and became the first two humans to lay eyes on this strange new world. Her tone was hushed, her face illuminated with the avid glow of discovery. That storm would drown you in midair, but it’s the only reason this planet has a breathable atmosphere. Out of chaos, there is cosmos.

He winces a little at the memory. They haven’t spoken much since they beamed out a couple cycles ago, not beyond what was necessary to run the ship. Perhaps that’s why he feels so unmoored. That, and the dreams.

Across the table, B’Elanna picks up her fork. “I believe in those,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“In dreams. Dreams are like, diagnostics from your subconscious. If you’re seeing a pattern and you think it’s connected with what’s going on, you should talk to her again. Make her listen. You’re good at that.”

He’s about to disagree on that last point when his combadge chirps. And lo: “Janeway to Chakotay. Report to the ready room.”

He and B’Elanna exchange meaningful looks. “On my way,” he says, and closes the comm.

“Maybe it’s a sign,” B’Elanna says around a mouthful of egg.

“Hmm. Tell me straight, Torres. Am I crazy?”

She shrugs. “I mean, yeah, you could be. But this is the Delta Quadrant, Chakotay. Compared to the crazy we encounter on a weekly basis, ancient prophecies and psychic visions barely register as weird.”

Chakotay mulls that over a moment, then stands and collects his things. “That’s surprisingly philosophical, coming from you.”

“What’s that supposed to—son of a peta’Q’! I thought you said you weren’t hungry!”

“Keep me updated on the deuterium injectors,” he says over his shoulder. “Thanks for the toast!”

His renewed sense of purpose lasts a little longer than his toast—just long enough to transit the two hallways and short turbolift ride between the mess hall and the captain’s ready room. Tuvok is already inside, brows deeply furrowed, looking on as Kathryn watches the desk-mounted viewscreen with a glare that could frost a window.

Chakotay catches only the tail end of the transmission.

—appear before the council and stamp out this heresy, says a man’s voice. We look forward to welcoming you to Anthris, Honored.

At that, Kathryn springs out of her chair and stalks to the viewport. Chakotay rotates the screen, scrubs the message back to the beginning, and feels the last of his optimism wither to dust.

The home world Anthrisi have responded to their petition for mining rights in the belt. But not—how did Kathryn put it?—the proper secular authorities. It’s like he had said in the briefing: the real power on Anthris lies with clerics like the man on screen, rich men who see the Oneiros colony as little more than a troublesome labor camp, and Voyager as its chosen champion. To them, approving Voyager’s petition outright would only serve to vindicate those rabble-rousers and their renegade ideas. Besides, the mere suggestion that the Promised One would make their first blessed appearance on that backwater is preposterous, insupportable, an affront to everything they hold sacred. And most sacrilegious of all—a woman.

Surely, the man continues, Captain Janeway can understand their position. As she herself has stated, she isn’t the One alluded to in the prophecy. But if she were to testify to this before the high council on Anthris, and call those lost souls back into the fold, the Anthrisi would be in her debt. Full and unrestricted access to the dilithium in the belt would be the least they could offer in return.

On screen, the man once again bows over his jeweled hands. We look forward to welcoming you to Anthris, Honored.

Chakotay suspects this man would change his tune if he could see Kathryn now. She’s livid. She chafes at the misogyny, and she resents the implication that she can be bribed. Most of all, she remembers her oaths: to seek out and protect new life, to obey the Prime Directive, to act always in the interests of peace. Every line of her lean, restless frame seems to vibrate with conviction.

That’s how he knows she won’t go for what Tuvok coolly describes as the most logical course of action, which would be to take the dilithium and leave, permission be damned. True, the Anthrisi couldn’t stop them, but without her testimony the system might erupt into a full-blown schism, and she won’t allow these people to suffer on Voyager’s account. She’ll testify in front of a hundred councils, under whatever interrogation methods they care to subject her to, before she lets that happen.

The way she says this fills Chakotay with a fierce affection. He spares a moment to thank Camaxtli for leading him to this woman—but also to beg for guidance, because looming beneath the heat of his admiration is an icy dread unlike anything he’s ever felt before.

Blood is going to be spilt on Anthris. He doesn’t know how he knows this. He just knows.

Tuvok, fearing a trap, is also wary. At the end of the day, though, there’s nothing else for it: Kathryn has Tom lay in a course for Anthris, one-quarter impulse, and dismisses her two senior officers to take care of their routine duties. At his request, she agrees to include Chakotay on the away team, if only to help him unburden his conscience.

She assumes his anxiety is all for Oneiros. “Never fear, Commander,” she says, patting his back with her usual pluck. “I’ve saved them once, I can save them again.”

Who’s going to save you? Chakotay wants to say, but doesn’t.

From space, Anthris looks like a lump of raw emerald seamed with ivory. As Voyager drops into low orbit, the greens resolve into rainforest and rivers, the ivory into terraced cities that descend like steps into the turquoise sea. The moon’s capital lies on the coast of a large island near the equator, kept cool by trade winds and a marine layer that burns off by midmorning. There are no prefabs or adobe here, only marble and glass nestled amid lush crescents of parkland, streets worn smooth with the tread of billions of feet.

If only Chakotay could enjoy it. It’s a lovely day, and he’s just finished touring the temple quarter with his Anthrisi guide, a spry old historian who answers his questions with voluble enthusiasm. From him, Chakotay has learned that the temple foundations date back over three thousand years. He’s learned that the council is in fact divided on the issue of Oneiros, split between hardline conservatives and reformists who would grant the colony more say in its decisions. He’s learned that the people favor reform by a sizeable margin, though contact with Voyager has galvanized both sides. Earlier that week, protestors clashed outside the forum, and scores were injured.

And this, reflects Chakotay, is the mire into which his captain has been pitched headlong. Alone, and without so much as a phaser to defend herself.

He glances at the temple’s great stone doors, only half-listening as his guide expounds on the finer points of their construction. Kathryn passed through them hours ago, small and dignified in her dress uniform, and hasn’t yet come out. Outside, the wide sweep of marble-paved plaza is thronged with the Anthrisi faithful, clerics in dark hooded robes, and knots of gawking onlookers, eager for a glimpse of Oneiros’s unlikely savior. The mood is buzzy, even festive, but with an undercurrent of tension that builds the longer those doors remain shut.

At last, the temple doors creak open. A shiver runs through the crowd. Chakotay and his escort press to the front, arriving just in time to see Kathryn emerge from under the portico with several members of the council. She’s still talking to them; she looks tired, solemn maybe, but to all appearances unharmed. Only—

“Ah, Commander,” she says as he approaches. “Allow me to introduce my first officer, Chakotay.”

Chakotay goes through the motions as swiftly as diplomacy and his own whirling brain will allow. At the first opportunity, he pulls her aside.

“Where did you get that?”

Kathryn colors, feeling at the wreathe twined gracefully around her temples. A small blossom, white with a bloody whorl in the middle, breaks off in her hand. “Oh, this? It’s the custom around here to give these to guests. Hardly regulation, but I didn’t want to offend by refusing.” She gives a wry chuckle. “Why? Don’t tell me it’s toxic.”

What am I supposed to do? If you’re out there, tell me what to do.

Her amusement crystallizes into impatience. “Well? Speak freely, Commander.”

In desperation, he stammers out something about returning to Voyager for debrief. She gives him a once-over, assures him that they will debrief as soon as she’s finished here, but he can beam up now if he’s feeling ill—she has everything under control. Then she’s gone, striking off toward the circle of milling dignitaries waiting to meet her, and Chakotay trails after, because while he doesn’t know what this means, he knows he can’t let her out of his sight.

The minutes drag on. He’s vaguely aware of more civilities, more introductions, more names and faces that smear together into one kaleidoscopic blur. He smiles, he bows. Chakotay, an honor to meet you. Your home is very beautiful. The first officer, yes. No, I haven’t seen the space port yet. Seventy-thousand light years, if you can believe it. That’s right, Cha-ko-tay. It’s a tattoo, the same one my father had, and his father before him. Smile, bow.

Chakotay is returning yet another bow when something glimmers in the corner of his eye. He turns on reflex, following the flicker to a raised arm, a hand glinting in the sun. One robed figure has pushed forward out of the mass, and is pointing something at Kathryn. Something small and…metallic.

His mind goes quiet. When the time comes, you will know what to do.

And Kolopak was right; he does know what to do now. After all, it was foretold.

Chakotay surges forward, but he doesn’t feel anything. Instead he floats, watching it unfold as if from outside himself: Kathryn shoved back onto the marble tile, lost amid a welter of scuffling blows and phaser fire; Kathryn with her flowers askew, straining to sit up under the dark, smoking bulk draped across her lap; Kathryn reaching for her combadge, calling out in a voice that slices through the din like a knife, tipped with steel and—oh, thank the gods—strong as ever.

Janeway to Voyager, I need emergency medical transport! The commander’s been shot, I repeat, the commander’s been—

He slams back into his body with all the violence of birth. The next breath sears his lungs. He coughs wetly, his nostrils burning with the smell of ozone, singed fabric, his own charred skin. A hot, sticky tang wells up in his mouth and trickles down his chin. The sun is blinding overhead, so bright it bleaches the edges of his vision, and the universe fines itself down to what he can see and feel and touch—the flayed-open agony in his chest, the blank sky. And above him, a silhouette, haloed with flowers.

Hold on, Kathryn says. He feels her arms tighten around him as the air begins to shimmer. Chakotay, hold on. That’s an order.

Delirious with pain, he wants to laugh. His insides are melting, and there are stars in her hair, and he thinks he could die happy now if not for the fact that in doing so he would be defying her iron will. He feels his spirit billow like a sail, and with a wrench forces himself to focus on her eyes. They pierce him through; they stake him by the heart to the world of flesh and matter. Saint Kathryn, he thinks, absurdly. Our Lady of Perpetual Devotion. Patronage: the Delta Quadrant, homebound travelers, first officers, impossible odds…

She shakes him. Something feathers past his face. It could be a loose petal, or her breath as she says, Stay with me, Chakotay.

“Yes, ma’am,” he whispers in the beam up. He clings to consciousness until sickbay materializes around them, and when the darkness finally takes him, he doesn’t dream.

Chapter Text

Chakotay comes to feeling like he’s just gone fifteen rounds with a Nausicaan. The surgery lights blaze at full power, and now the silhouette above him is the EMH, who greets him with a look of supreme irritation.

“Commander,” he hums. “Nice of you to join us in the land of the living.”

Then the gods take pity, and Chakotay passes out again.

When Chakotay wakes for the second time, the sickbay lights are dimmed for the night cycle. The world feels muzzy and far away. Distantly, in the back of his mind, he supposes that important things must be happening beyond these bulkheads—history shifting like sand, fortunes rising and falling in the aftermath of what he’s done, whether he acted by choice or on instinct or at the bidding of forces greater than himself. Some part of him clamors to get up, needing to know.

The rest of him is perfectly content where he is, thank you very much. The steady beep of his biomonitors and the cool, antiseptic scent of eucalyptus soon lull him back into a doze. Later, the only thing he’ll remember is the doctor’s muffled baritone, wafting from his office. Amata sposa, Orfeo son io, e vivo ancor, ti venni fin negli Elisi a ricercar…

He wakes again sometime the next day. The painkillers have worn off, but his head is full of Italian love songs, and he smiles to think that somehow she heard them, and followed them here.

“Kathryn,” he says in a croak.

The captain is looking down at him, blue eyes soft. “Chakotay. How are you feeling?”

“Not so bad.” He coughs to clear his parched, rusty throat. “You should see the other guy.”

She lets out a breathy laugh. But before she can reply, his own words catch up to him—the other guy—and the last forty-eight hours come flooding back in a dizzying rush. Anthris, demonstrations outside the forum, an assassin on the temple grounds, Oneiros—

“No, don’t,” Kathryn says, holding him down by the shoulder. “At ease, Commander.”

“But—the Anthrisi—”

“They’re fine. No one else has been hurt. Even the man who shot you—who tried to shoot me—he’s a little worse for wear, but he’s alive and in custody. You see…”

She trails off, and a cloud seems to pass over her. Chakotay sinks back into his biobed. An electric current is tingling down his spine, and he doesn’t think it’s the nerve regenerators.

“Evidently, you made quite the impression down there,” she goes on. “Now some of the home world Anthrisi are claiming that you are the brave and powerful being from the prophecy. The one from the stars, the one who will ‘swallow the fire.’ Or rather, we both are—somehow. Alas, theology was never my strongest subject.” At his stunned silence, she huffs another laugh, this one bitter and humorless. “They just saw a man from outside their solar system thwart an assassination that would’ve sparked a civil war. They watched him survive a phaser blast that should have killed him. From their point of view, it makes sense.”

“What does this mean?”

“A lot of diplomatic negotiations, for starters. As it turns out, the attempt on my life turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the colonists. Not the man’s intention, I’m sure. While you were laid up here, the people were out in the streets, demanding that the council give Oneiros a seat at the table. They'll have to make concessions soon, or they’ll have a revolution on their hands.”

“He was right,” Chakotay murmurs into the ceiling. “We were right to come here.”

Kathryn frowns. “These people have a difficult road ahead of them. Best-case scenario, they form an alliance like early United Earth, maybe even sow the seeds of a new Federation in the Delta Quadrant. Worst-case, they splinter into rival states and declare war within the year. However this ends, the entire course of their development has changed. We changed it.”

He blinks, jarred out of his reverie by her distress. “Contact is always messy,” he says gently. “You can’t touch something without changing it, or being changed by it. I’d like to see Jean-Luc Picard do better.”

“Yes, well,” she says with an absent wave. “We can argue the ethics of the Prime Directive after the doctor clears you for duty.” She pauses in thought, fingers held to her mouth. “There is a certain serendipity about it, I’ll give you that. By a stroke of dumb luck, this particular mess has fixed itself, possibly for the good.”

Dumb luck? No, Chakotay doesn’t believe in dumb luck. He’s agnostic on prophecies. But he knows when he’s had a brush with the extraordinary, so he closes his eyes and lets his gratitude ripple outward like a wave through subspace, hoping it reaches whoever, or whatever, has been guiding his steps.

When he opens his eyes, Kathryn is pacing alongside the biobed, scrubbing at her jaw.

“You don’t think it was just luck, either.”

She keeps pacing. “I shouldn’t have dismissed your concerns so quickly, Chakotay. Perhaps we—I don’t know—passed through some kind of temporal anomaly that resonated with your neuro-chemistry and showed you the future. Maybe you made contact with an exotic, four-dimensional alien, and the dreams were its way of warning you. But gods? Prophecies?” At last she slows, then heaves a sigh. “I just wish I had a rational way to explain what happened here.”

Ethics are one thing; Chakotay isn’t so sure how to respond to this. He could say, There is a way to explain what happened here, but it wouldn’t fit your definition of rational. He could say, Your need to explain everything rationally is why you’ll never understand it, though you’ll never stop trying. He could say, This is one of the things I love about you. He could say all these things, and they would all be true—but then again, he isn’t looking to convert her.

So instead he breaks out the most rakish grin he can manage, considering he’s just regrown most of his motor neurons. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Nailed it. The look she levels him is half exasperated, half fond, and one-hundred percent Kathryn Janeway. After a second, she grabs his hand and says, “What were you thinking? You’re not a bodyguard for God’s sake, you’re my first officer.”

“Mm, and I’d like to keep it that way, if it’s all the same to you. I’m not interested in a promotion.”

“I’m serious, Chakotay. If I’m in danger, your duty is to outlive me so you can take command of Voyager. I don’t care if Jesus Christ orders you otherwise.”

He feels his grin broaden, then fade. “Respectfully, Captain, you might as well throw me in the brig for the rest of the trip. I won’t sit back and let you die, not on anyone’s orders. It isn’t fair of you to ask me to do it, and I refuse. Respectfully.”

Another sigh. “Noted.”

That’s enough, he thinks, but he can’t stop himself. “Some feelings run deeper than duty,” he says.

Above him, Kathryn’s expression spasms with unreadable emotion before subsiding into guarded stillness. Chakotay exhales, letting the quiet spool out. Even if he could claw it back, he doesn’t think he would: she’s studying his palm, tracing the lines with her thumb as though she could read his future there, and despite everything he finds the motion soothing.

When she finally speaks, her voice is very low. “Can I tell you something? You have to promise not to laugh.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

She flashes a fragile smile. “Back there, on Anthris, I actually prayed. I have no idea who I was even praying to, I just kept making this bargain in my head, over and over. Let him live. Just...let him live, and I’ll tell him how much I miss New Earth, how I daydream sometimes about what we could have if things were different, if we didn’t have to be captain and first officer anymore. And I do, Chakotay. I think about it far more often than I should. But I am captain—”

“And I’m first officer,” Chakotay finishes. “I know. I’m not trying to win you over, I’m simply—explaining myself.” He flexes at the elbow and stares at their joined hands, the old ache twisting round and round under his ribs. “I’ve waited a long time for you, Kathryn. I can wait a little longer.”

“But not forever,” she says. It’s not a question. “Can you wait until we see Voyager home? Is it fair of me to ask that?”

“That could take decades. We might never make it. What then?”

Only after he’s said it does he muster the courage to meet her eyes. There’s a glassy sheen over them now, but her lips twitch again as she picks up his hand and holds it to her face. The swell of her cheekbone presses against his senses with a sharp, importunate reality. Texture, temperature, pressure. In that moment, Chakotay doesn’t need the spirits to tell him that he will chase this feeling halfway across the galaxy and back; he knows it for himself.

“Decades?” Kathryn says, still smiling. “O ye of little faith.”

One day cycles into night, then another. From his biobed, Chakotay informs the home world Anthrisi that it is his wish for the assassin to be spared execution, while Kathryn does the same with the colonists. Three days later, he’s well enough to attend the opening ceremony of their first pan-system diplomatic summit, though he leaves the real negotiating to others.

Voyager departs as soon as the first round of talks are concluded. Chakotay has returned to light duty, so he’s standing on the bridge as the system streaks into the distance. In seconds the Anthrisi—their faint red star, their verdant moon and sunset colony world, their gods and their prophecies—are far behind him. One pinprick of light among a hundred-billion pinpricks.

Afterward, he heads down to aeroponics with the only parting gift that Kathryn would accept, besides the dilithium: a cutting of native liana, taken from the oldest, most sacred grove on Anthris. The vine is gnarled and leafless, but the sap is a milky, vernal green, and he thinks it’ll do well here, on a high shelf where its tendrils can wind themselves around the slotted steel.

“May you shade many generations,” he says in Maya, as he roots it into place.

That night, he dreams.

Chapter Text

“Ready or not, here I come!” someone shouts.

Chakotay opens his eyes in the aeroponics bay. But this isn’t the aeroponics bay he knows—the cramped, jerry-rigged cargo hold that is still one of his favorite places on Voyager. This aeroponics bay is easily five times the size, bright as a greenhouse and ripe with the smell of living, growing things. If it weren’t for the thrumming impulse engines and the Starfleet insignias stamped into every few meters of bulkhead, he might never know he was in space.

Footsteps pound across the metal grating. He turns, and a small figure in civvies barrels out from behind a trellis and skids to a stop in front of him.

It’s a human girl, maybe ten years old, all coltish limbs and high animal spirits. Chakotay takes in her crop of black hair, her clear olive skin, the blue-gray eyes set in a keen, clever face. He doesn’t recognize her, exactly, but something about her strikes a chord.

“That’s not how you play the game,” she says. “You’re supposed to hide.”

With the abrupt certainty of dreams, he realizes that she’s speaking to him in Maya.

“You count and I’ll hide this time,” she says, and runs back the way she came.

Her tone brooks no argument. So Chakotay counts to thirty in Maya and sets off down the center aisle, searching. He wanders among the herb beds, picking out sage and spith and a dozen others he doesn’t know, past rows of tender seedlings and towers of leafy greens that stretch to the ceiling. Eventually, the culinary and medicinal plants give way to ornamentals—orchids, protea, hibiscus, wisteria—and this is where he finds the girl.

Where else? he thinks. Out loud he says, “I thought you were supposed to be hiding.”

She jumps down from a bucket of growth medium that she’s been using as a stool. “You took too long.”

Chakotay smiles at her blush and glances higher up the shelf, which is thickly curtained with flowering vines. “Why do I get the feeling that I’ve caught you doing something you shouldn’t?”

“Mom doesn’t like it when I pick the flowers. I just want one, though.”

“All right, just one. I won’t tell her if you don’t,” he adds with a wink.

The girl giggles, and he rustles through the foliage until he finds a good one, with pristine white petals around a perfect red corona. He plucks it carefully, then leans over to tuck it behind her ear.

“Not for decoration,” she says, giggling again as she bats his hand away. “It’s for science. I get to use the microscopes today!”

“You’re going to dissect it? Don’t you think it’s too pretty for that?”

She snatches the flower away and holds it close to her nose, poring over its stamen structure. “Mom says it’s important to put everything under a microscope. Especially pretty things.”

“Does she now,” Chakotay says. He watches her awhile, struck afresh by her familiarity. “I know you from somewhere, ch’ok. What is your name?”

The girl looks up. For a moment, something else seems to peer out from behind those blue-gray eyes; not a girl at all, but a sublime intelligence, as old and as vast as the universe itself.

“I have had many names,” it says. “She doesn’t yet have one.”

Then the communicator on her wrist bleeps, and the girl is just a girl again, the otherworldly gleam nothing more than a trick of the light. She pirouettes on her heel, hair flying wild around her, and starts skipping off down the aisle.

Chakotay’s heart skips with her, and without meaning to he takes a step forward. “Wait,” he calls out. The girl turns. “Will I ever see you—her again? When I’m awake?”

The girl’s knowing eyes flash from across the bay. She trips lightly back to him, pulls him down by the shirt, stands on tip-toe to whisper the answer in his ear. In the dream, and in his sleep, Chakotay laughs.