Disclaimers, ratings and warnings are in Part 1.
THE BADLANDERS
PART THIRTEEN
She couldn't tell him everything. The time wasn't right. It wasn't possible to tell him everything because she knew that telling him would only make him realise without fully understanding that there was more at stake. So much more. He would act on only what she told him. He needed full integration and that, she sighed, had to wait until they were out of the Badlands.
Chakotay lay spooned behind her, his arm thrown around her in complete abandon, a light snore filling his cabin. It didn't unsettle her, his snoring. It was more an affirmation of normality than a physiological problem that irritated many women.
He had been distraught after their lovemaking, crying out that he didn't know himself anymore.
"Who am I?" was the question he kept asking, and later, when they made love a second time - it seemed to her that he couldn't get enough of her - he had been quiet. Sunken deep in his own thoughts, the facial muscles relaxed, without the strain and anger that had marked him in the first hours she had seen him, were no longer there. How long it was going to last, she could only hope and pray that it would be long enough to give them time to get him out. Her own safety and that of her crew depended on this slightly changed equilibrium.
But Chakotay was a deeply disturbed, deranged, maniacal man bent on revenge. Only Tuvok had any idea what prompted this and if anyone else knew, they based it in conjecture. His body joined so strongly with her, it established a lost, now familiar territory and she sensed it was this that caused such a major bewilderment in him. His rational being, the one he perceived to be the only one recognisable to him alone, was seriously compromised. Before her he had not known - in the Badlands at least - that he had an older and better point of reference for his ethics.
He believed implicitly that his moral universe, one in which he could practice obscene deeds and criminal acts and never be held accountable for it, but in his reality rather revered and condoned and equally practiced by his subordinates was the only one that existed for him. Before her, he had probably never had to question his actions for he believed that they were his rules, his contract, his ethics, his moral code if it could under normal circumstances be called moral.
Now, just the act of making love, of sensing instinctively that there was a part of him that had once seen light, that another force - that of goodness and honour and self-respect and the respect for the dignity of others - operated within him, made him quiver with insecurity and confusion.
If his crew could see him now, they would never think that it was the same man they always dealt with. Yet, the other force, the one that made him treat her body with so little respect, so little dignity, lurked unnervingly close to the edge of his reason. She was not fooled, or foolish enough to be naive in thinking that simply telling him he used to be a good man, would be enough.
What she told him, had to serve for now. A promise he made to protect her and also the rest of her crew would have to serve for now. She had been astute enough to bargain - albeit it subtle and never openly spoken in words - for her crew's safety for at least the next forty eight hours. It was a crucial time period they needed to regroup and plan ahead.
He had been satisfied, though she could see that he wasn't entirely happy, the suspicion still lurking in his dark eyes that there was more she wasn't telling him.
Kathryn closed her eyes briefly, her mouth curving into a sad smile. Chakotay had for a few seconds taken the belt again and raised his hand, but before he could bring it down on her still bruised skin, instantly retracted. Perhaps her bruises triggered something in his memory, perhaps he realised violence wasn't going to be his answer for once. He had sagged on the bed, clutched her in his arms and in a rare show of deep affection, asked her over and over to forgive him.
It was a start. That he could experience remorse. The Chakotay who dragged her the first time from the sick bay had shown no mercy, no remorse when he violated her. At least she, even though semi-conscious when he raped her, could still affect him in a positive way. One that made him question his role as a Maquis leader, his role as the mastermind of evil on the Liberty and the Badlands.
"You were good once, Chakotay," she had said with conviction. "The same person, just - "
"Two different versions of me?"
"Yes."
"A long time ago?"
"Yes."
"What happened? You - you didn't enter the Badlands just to capture me."
"No," she sighed. "I didn't. But yes, you were a different man. The Federation - "
Chakotay's lips pursed together when she mentioned the Federation.
"What about the Federation?"
"Robbed you of your life, as surely as they robbed me of mine."
"Kathryn, here in the Badlands, I always believed that who I am, was the person I have always been. It was - still is, I suppose - a part of me I believe absolutely. I didn't think I had another life. I didn't think I had a life..." His voice trailed. The next moment her eyes grew wide with shock as he moved as swift as a snake and prodded her neck with his d'k tagh. "I could kill you now and blow you out an airlock. Then I'd have the next girl under me - sweet virgin - who would try to put up a fight. I'd put my belt to her to shut her up and calmly ram my cock straight up her cunt. No matter if she cries her heart out. Means nothing to me. Nothing, you understand? Right now I can flip you over and fuck your ass so you will scream for mercy and I wouldn't give you any. I'd call my men to rape and beat you and stand by watching them eat you whole. We will be in Alkorea in two days where I could sell you to the highest bidder. Know what the winner usually does? Makes a public display of fucking you on a platform to a crowd that knows only how to tell him to carry on, it's so fucking good."
He had paused, his brow covered in a film of perspiration, the sharp point of the dagger pressing into her skin. She wasn't going to cry out in pain. She wasn't going to give in to her own fear.
"But you won't," she said quietly.
"Now you tell me there's another Chakotay, someone who was different. Someone who was a victim of the Federation. Now you tell me the Federation robbed me of my life. What life? What fucking life?"
The dagger dropped away from her neck, fell to the side.
"Tell me, Kathryn..."
"Your memories of a part of your life was altered, Chakotay. More likely they were removed..."
"What?"
There. It was out. Her heart had thundered. She wondered if he'd stick the dagger in her neck again. But something happened to his face. It became pale, so pale that it seemed he was going to vomit any moment. He clutched at his stomach, then he clutched his head as if a vein burst and he was going to expire any moment. His eyes became glazed; could he even see her properly? He groped for her, searching what she sensed was an anchor, and missing once or twice until he found purchase - gripping her arm so tightly that she winced. The disbelief in his face, layered upon the queasiness was so palpable that she want to cry herself.
She remembered Owen Paris's words, "You understand that you must bring him back, don't you?"
She looked at Chakotay, stripped momentarily of every strength he had, the cold-bloodedness of the way he raped, tortured, slaughtered.
And she thought, Never could I deliver him into the clutches of Owen McKenzie Paris...
Chakotay's response, a single word that stuck in his throat before it issued like a weak croak from made her want to murder Owen Paris. Owen Paris who killed her mother, who made his son Tom her half-brother... The man she suspected, also spawned Nicholas Locarno. The resemblance between the men was just too coincidental.
And, as if Chakotay read her thoughts, he asked, "Is Owen Paris mixed up in this somewhere?"
Only
you don't know how deeply...
"I am sorry, Chakotay."
"I have been a different person?" he asked. "This is not my life?"
"You were a good man. The best." Her voice choked, remembering the man he had been. "The Federation saw to it that you would forget that...."
"I wasn't always like...this?"
"No."
They were quiet for the next few minutes, with Chakotay mulling over her words, the conviction with she had told him some of the truth. He frowned, he swore under his breath, he looked like he would cry, then he looked like he could kill her again in a swift stab of his dagger. If Jenny and Megan and Harry and the other prisoners came to mind, it was in the way the beads of perspiration settled on his brow, looking like drops of blood. There was something oozing from his mouth, down the side and when she took a cloth to wipe it away, the stain was a sick greenish colour.
What was happening to him? Literally happening to him?
The realisation not of his heinous deeds, but the fact that he was callously, without thought for any sensibilities, robbed of his memory and had it supplanted with all manner of evil... That was what was getting to him. The United Federation of Planets that had to uphold all that was great and honourable among its soldiers took away from him the most important element of his person - his humanity.
In the hours that followed, Chakotay was restless, and like a man drowning, holding on to her as his anchor. He made love with her with the desperation of the damned. And this time she allowed him such freedom as would purge him of his demons.
But, just before he fell in a restless sleep, he floored her with a question she had dreaded he would ask.
"Kathryn."
"What is it, Chakotay?"
"I made love to you. It - it is what made me sense something. You touched me...in here...and here..." he said, pointing first to his heart and then his head. "You were different, far different from the rest. As if my body knew you from another time and place. Only I couldn't understand why my body remembered when I couldn't. Do you understand that?
"Yes."
"Then, Kathryn, are you part of what I lost?"
She turned cold, couldn't speak for several heavy seconds. The air crackled with tension. She felt the old, old pain, a pain she never shared with anyone, that festered inside her like a cancer, eating away at every resolve, every thought that had Chakotay in it.
"Kathryn?"
She sighed.
"Yes. I am a part of that life."
"More than just friends, Kathryn Janeway?"
"More than that."
"Then Kathryn, did they take away the best part of my life?"
She wept, deep wracking sobs that wouldn't stop. Chakotay held her like the trooper he was, always protecting, always fiercely proud to hold her. Always just...Chakotay.
When she could compose herself, her words when it came, were hollow, sad.
"Yes, the best part of your life."
He gripped her shoulders firmly.
"Whatever it takes, Kathryn, I want that life back."
**********
END PART THIRTEEN