PART FIVE
My dearest love
Today you were so far away. It was not difficult to know where your thoughts had strayed to. It always happens from the fifth or second last day of our precious time together. You sat opposite me and the silence in the gondola as it glided through the water of the narrow canals was more oppressing than comforting.
I thought I heard a nightingale sing, the only music above Federico's long oar cleaving the water. I sat back and studied you and once again, the worry overcame me, though I tried my best not to show it. But your eyes were distant, even as they met mine. Isn't that such an irony? You looked at me and yet you didn't see me.
Where were you dwelling, my love? To the day that we have to part again? To when you leave Venice for home on Dorvan and I, to my lonely apartment in San Francisco? Were you thinking again that we are both nearing the time of our parting, when our last kisses are filled with sorrow and longing, of the prospect that we'll see one another again only a year from now?
My own heart is heavy, Chakotay. For I too, struggle with a great decision. The dark alleyways, when the tourists leave and when we meander through the district of Lantonini, strolling arm in arm and enjoying the peace and quiet, will be no more for us. Last night when we walked through the narrow lanes, I was again reminded of our reality, a realm in which we do not belong together.
I looked at you today and the old feelings, familiar, for they walk with me always, overcame me. I know you'll tell me otherwise. I know you, too, try to wish them away. I was struck again by the fact, O, ? unholy reality, that I am stealing the happiness of another.
Tonight you lay in my arms, your warm breath on my skin making it tingle even now, and my heart ached like a thousand knife blades had cut it into shreds. Your face, lit only by the soft moonbeams that steal shyly into our room, bear none of the concerns of life, except the peace of being with me. All strain is gone. I touched your face as you slept and smiled when you murmured my name.
I love you, Chakotay, so much that I am convinced that I'll not even stop when I breathe my last.
But our time for now must end, and too soon. Too soon!
Carina had memorised the words of Kathryn Janeway's fifth entry in her journal. It filled her with dismay that she sensed what Kathryn was going to tell her father.
Venice must be a beautiful city that they had chosen it for their time on Earth together. Carina's eyes grew misty as she stared out the viewscreen and thought of Kathryn's words in the journal. A city she wanted to visit and see all the places where her father had once been a happy man. A happy man with the woman he loved.
Thoughts of her father made her glance backwards quickly. Chakotay was now asleep again. Tomaso had found something in the med-kit which he determined it wouldn't harm her father if he administered it. So in Chakotay's waking hours, he had lain on his back, not speaking to them, but also unable to move about much.
He had, for a second time, accidentally struck her, and it had made Tomaso so angry that he had flung Chakotay across the rear of the shuttle. After that, her father had quietened down and listened to Tomaso.
"When I am healed, God help you, Tomaso," Chakotay had threatened, "I'll come for you. Don't think I don't know what's happening…"
And Tomaso had taken no notice of his uncle, just made sure he remained tethered to the bunk.
She hadn't yet read the final entry in the journal, for she had been too afraid of what she'd read there. The two previous entries had filled her with a sense of doom. On the next page, there was a dried and pressed rose, the same colour she had seen in the encased glass in the wooden box. She had run the imager over the box, entered the information into the database and finally determined the wood was rosewood. But her mind kept coming back to the last entry. Her heart filled with dread.
She sensed that it had to do with why her father had become such a quiet man, the rage just under the surface of that quietness. Her mind went back to the time just before her eighth birthday when her father had returned from his annual vacation. Carina smiled tenderly as she once again glanced back to where her father and Tomaso lay sleeping on their bunks. Now she knew where her father had gone and why he had always been so sad when he returned from Earth.
Always sad. And then the questioning from her mother that started when he arrived home. Questioning that usually ended in an argument. One such conversation she remembered now. Her mother had been unsettled and her father resolute.
"It's my business, Annika. But you've won again."
Carina never knew what her father had meant with those words she had overheard, but now, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Obviously her mother questioned her father about Kathryn Janeway, and her father had told her that he would not go away to Earth again. Her mother had accepted the news with some doubt, Carina believed now.
"Can you love me then, Chakotay?" Annika Hansen had asked.
"Because it's over doesn't mean things will change. I can't help how I feel, but you can rest assured now that my sojourns with her have come to an end."
That may not have been precisely the way the conversation went, but Carina thought that it was the gist of it. Her mother had retired, become harder, more impassive, detached. Her father had become reclusive at times. Never after that had she seen her parents enjoy an evening together or just talk about daily happenings.
They loved her, she realised, and she accepted that she had become the common bond between them. Still, she wanted her parents to behave towards one another like Tomaso's parents did. Always loving, always showing their affection for one another. Tomaso and Nina and Remy basked in their parents' love.
What did she have?
Nothing.
Sighing, Carina was brought to the present again when she heard her father begin to stir awake. Switching to autopilot, she moved quickly to the rear, sitting on the edge of the narrow bunk. He was perspiring again. It wasn't good to let him sleep for such prolonged periods, but he gave them little option when he descended into a raging fit.
The damp sponge was a relief when she pressed it to his lips, for he gave a sigh. Then his eyes flew open.
"Papa…"
"Carina…thank you…"
"How are you feeling, Papa?" she asked, dreading to hear his answer.
He closed his eyes, turned his head away from her. He gave a cry. Carina thought it sounded full of pain and despair. She touched his hand gently, relieved when he didn't slap it out of the way.
"Dirty. I need to wash."
"Sure, Papa. I'll take you - "
"No, I can help myself," he insisted, still facing away from her.
"Please. Just let me hold your hand. I - "
Then Chakotay turned to face her. His eyes were bloodshot, from the long hours he’d slept, from the pain, from the pure exertion of control over his demonic rages. He was snorting like a bull again. Carina looked to where Tomaso lay sleeping deeply. He had only taken a nap after being awake for more than forty eight hours.
She was alone with her father. When she looked at Chakotay again, he had shifted to sit up. He gripped her shoulders. She winced from the pain.
"Papa…" she whispered.
Then, looking directly in her eyes, she realised that he wasn't about to hurt her; he was trying his best to control the rage and fight the demons that were let loose. The madness great-grandfather died of, she had been told once.
"H-help me," Chakotay croaked.
His clothing was soaked through. He hadn't washed since the first day of their journey and had only used the toilet, something with which Tomaso helped him. Now, she bore her father's weight against her as he stood up. It was down a short stair and into the hold. Together they struggled, Chakotay shuffling along. By the time he stood in front of the sonic shower, he was exhausted. He stood a long time, regaining his equilibrium, the dizziness slowly receding. He had complained of the dizziness the last few days, and Carina hadn't been certain if it was the flu virus or the mad gene of his ancestors that caused the drunkenness.
She helped him strip, casting her eyes down at the embarrassed look in his eyes. When he finally stood inside the small cubicle, she activated the shower. A recycler and replicator had been fitted in this part of the shuttle and his clothes, soiled and smelly, had quickly disappeared. A fresh pair of pyjamas and boxer shorts were replicated. She glanced at her father who seemed a little stronger and refreshed, more sure of himself, more aware, too. It didn't fool her. They had a day to travel still and there was no telling how he would behave in the next twenty four hours.
When he was ready, his skin scrubbed and hair clean, she handed him a large towel.
"Will you be alright now, Papa?" she asked him as she moved away to give him time to dress.
"Yes…yes, I'll be okay…" There was a short pause. "Carina?"
"Yes, Papa?"
"Why?"
She was puzzled for a moment.
"I think you know, Papa. Mama is dead. I don't want to be alone," she replied, a little lamely.
"I'm going crazy. I feel I have no control over what is happening to me. I'll die, Carina."
"No! You must not say that, please!"
Then she strode out of the lower deck and made her way to the conn. Still trembling and fighting back the tears, she stared out the viewscreen, the view becoming blurred as she gave in and began to weep softly.
Tomaso was still dead to the world. She didn't want to wake him and pour her misery on him. She had done enough of that already. She stopped when she heard Chakotay come up. When she turned, he just stood there looking at her. Moving from her chair, she joined him and pressed him down on the bunk again.
"I hate being like this," he bit through clenched teeth as she tucked him in. He was already beginning to shiver. The temperature was raised in the cabin and he shouldn't have felt cold at all. He was shivering.
"Papa?"
A hand gripped and squeezed her heart, forcing her to cry out in pain. She was afraid. Tomaso had warned her that her father was regressing. Today he looked better but now, suddenly, cold fear took hold of her. She saw it in his eyes too, though he tried his best to bank it.
"Don't let them get me…" he muttered, furious at his own weakness. "Carina, keep away from me…"
"I can't, Papa. Let me give you something."
"I've slept enough," he said on a note of bitterness.
But she had made a good study of the items in the med-kit, had studied some medicinal agents in the database. She had already replicated some of the Valerian, a plant-based sedative that would allow him at least to lie still without the desire to sleep.
"This will be fine. Tomaso and I have made sure it won't harm you."
"Tomaso. He - he looks exhausted," Chakotay said as he glanced to the bunk where Tomaso lay sleeping.
"Yes, Papa. He's helped me a lot."
She administered the sedative, the hypospray making a swift hiss against his neck. She gave a wan smile as she watched his body relax. He sighed as he sagged back against the pillow. Later she sat on a little stool next to him and held his hand.
"Carina…I never did justice by you…"
"What do you mean, Papa?"
"Your mother and I… You must know that things weren't good between us."
"You punished me too."
"I know. I can never forgive myself. But I want you to know, sweetheart, that whatever happens to me, I love you. When you were born, I thought that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. Everything else faded…"
"Mama tried her best."
"I know, honey. I was at fault. I couldn't love her as she deserved…"
A silence ensued for several minutes. Carina rubbed the back of Chakotay's hand, smoothed his hair away from his face, leaned over to plant a kiss against his brow. It felt good loving her father, she thought, while he was in this state of normalcy. She had sensed very early on in her life that her father didn't love her mother, that the separate rooms they slept in weren't normal for a married couple who expressed their love through physical intimacy. Far back in the haze of the past, she remembered that they were in one bedroom, that she had sometimes joined them in the mornings and crawled in between them and loved both of them fervently. Then gradually, things changed. They became distant towards one another, hardly ever demonstrative.
Demonstrative. She saw Aunt Shauneez kiss Uncle Rhom often. They touched often. She had gazed at them with wonder at times, awed beyond measure. Then she wondered why her parents were never like that.
"You never kissed, held hands, shared a room, shared a bed. You rarely made conversation. No, Papa, I bear no resentment, for you each loved me, and for that I am grateful."
Chakotay closed his eyes. She saw how he struggled, biting his lips as he tried to will away the demons. The signs were more apparent now. The valerian was just enough to keep him calm, but awake. Sighing, she knew what was coming and she began to brace herself for the new onslaught.
"I am sorry, Carina, for not loving your mother. I wish I could. I tried, in the beginning."
"Did she trap you, Papa?"
His eyes flew open. "How did you know that?"
"Then it is true. She used me - " Carina felt at last the bitterness take hold of her, but she was her mother's daughter after all, so she repressed the negative feelings with great force. "But I am not sorry that you are my papa."
"Neither am I that you are my daughter. Thank you."
"Papa…"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"You know that we are taking you to Earth?"
"Yes," he said on a sigh. "I don't suppose I could ever stop you two."
"The EMH of Voyager will help and - and - "
"And who?"
"Admiral Janeway-Greaves…"
There was a long pause. Chakotay kept his gaze on her.
"Kathryn…" the name slipped from his tongue with the same caress she heard five days ago on Polarya. "How - how…?"
"I found your rosewood box."
"Spirits!"
"Tell me about her. Please, Papa?"
"You read the journal?"
Carina remained quiet. She knew that reading the journal was breaching intimacy and privacy, but she had been unbearably curious. Also, it shed light on so many things. Chakotay's nostrils had begun to flare. The demons were preparing to attack him again. She stole a quick glance at Tomaso. He had shifted to lie on his side, facing the bulkhead. When she looked at Chakotay again, the fire was back in his eyes.
"Aye…" she replied softly, flinching when he suddenly lifted himself off the bunk. "Papa!"
"Annika!"
*****
He was on fire again. The sonic shower had brought him only temporary relief. With superhuman effort he tried to control his frenzied rage. There were times that he experienced flashes of lucidity, when he could see Carina and Tomaso clearly. Especially Carina. Then he saw how her fear overrode her courage.
They had regenerated his torn skin from self-inflicted deep scratches. Tomaso had done the cleaning up and at times he could hear Carina cry.
Another moment of clarity. Carina telling him about the journal.
Then he lost it altogether. Sharp, blinding flashes of Annika hounding him for days about the rosewood box, his own deadly rejoinders that he would kill her if the box was tampered with, or just moved a millimeter from its spot. Annika never touched it. Instead, he had succumbed to her plaintive pleas for intimacy in compensation and he had complied, sunk his flesh in hers and ravaged her the entire night. He remembered his raw anger, his lust, her pathetic pleading.
She had trapped him once. She wasn't going to do it again. He had done the honourable thing and married her, sleeping with her at will and at his own whim. He wanted to break from her, but knew that she would hold Carina as her marker, a bargaining tool. So he stayed, because of Carina. And so he used Annika's body, sometimes, and those times he couldn't get Kathryn out of his mind.
Kathryn Janeway. His life. His all. His breathing, his beginning and his end. The reason he kept plodding through every day, making arrangements months in advance to travel to Earth, away from Annika, away from Carina, to be with Kathryn for one week. A week in which he lived. Lived! Their last time together…
He had found the rosewood box. Kathryn had left, left him alone, stolen away in the night and left him everything that bound the two of them together.
For months afterwards, he had been demented.
Now, Carina tending to him, Carina, his utterly remarkable, beautiful fourteen year old daughter had read Kathryn's journal. He knew the words, had memorised them in those first hours that his heart broke, demented in his bereavement. He knew every word that pierced his very soul. And later, much, much later, when he could begin to focus again, he realised why Kathryn had left him the rosewood box.
She wanted him to have a memory.
And when Carina told him she had found the journal that spoke in the deepest, most intimate tones of their last summer in Venice, he had, once again, lost control.
The maggots that ate the inside of his flesh crawled through his body, below the skin where his nerves were raw, torn, and ached in unbearable pain. They never paused, never became still to offer him relief. They crawled and ate him up and he had begun to scream.
Because it was not Carina's face he saw, but Annika Hansen, mutilated, grotesque in death, her eyes mocking him. And the maggots told him it was time to rise up against his enemy and strike. He lashed out, trying to blot out Annika's face; he bore into her and struck her face with all his might. He was in great pain. He was irrational. He was demented. He was abusive, swearing and hitting whatever found a way to stop him, or to protect itself.
"You unfeeling bitch! I'll show you."
And somewhere in his manic state, that part of his delirium that managed to retain a brittle hold on his reason, the reality of the present, he heard someone cry, "Papa! Papa!"
He stopped, the sliver of clarity long and wide enough for him to see the total fear on his little girl's face, her bloodied nose… Before the remorse set in, before he could utter a word of apology, he felt a cold, metallic instrument against his neck.
Tomaso stood before him.
"So help me God, Uncle, I swear I'm going to kill you!" were the last words he heard before he sank into the darkness his oblivion brought him.
***********
This time Tomaso was at the conn. Carina and her father were sleeping peacefully. He had woken up from the scuffling and swearing and one or two thumps. Carina was flung onto him. It took him only a second to grab the hypospray Carina had pressed under his pillow - a strategy they decided on - and render his uncle immovable again. There had been a moment when Chakotay was lucid, long enough for him to realise what he had done. But Tomaso had been furious with his uncle and had first thumped him good and solid in the stomach, winding him enough that he would stop. Then Tomaso calmly pressed the hypospray against Chakotay's neck and very quickly spread him along the length of his bunk.
Then he tended to Carina who was hysterical, lying under his bunk, crouched like a small baby or child who was filled with abject fear. He realised with sudden insight that Carina must have hidden under her bed whenever her parents had one of their arguments. They never got violent, was what Carina assured him, but her fear was always greater than her courage. And he had always told her it was because she was still only a child.
He had protected Carina more times than he could remember, had always told her to come to their home and sleep over. His mother never questioned him, except to say, "You two always make arrangements without our consent." And he would answer his mother, "Don't worry, Mama. Carina loves you and I know you love her. Why, she's like my own sister!"
Yes, he pulled Carina from under the bunk and cleaned her bloodied face, used the regenerator where skin had broken and once again, made the bruises go away. Then he had given her a painkiller, for she had a headache. She had knocked her head against the bulkhead when her father pushed her away from him.
He knew Chakotay didn't really see Carina but her mother.
Sighing, Tomaso prepared to enter Earth's orbit and land near Starfleet Medical. He had already determined the coordinates and knew exactly where to touch down. He was startled when he heard a voice.
"You are making an unauthorised entry into Earth's orbit. State your position and the nature of your visit."
On the viewscreen appeared the face of a man dressed in uniform.
"My name is Tomaso, from the planet Dorvan V. But I have traveled from Polarya. I wish to touch down at the coordinates - "
"What is your business?" came the peremptory response.
"I am bringing my uncle here for medical treatment - "
"We are not convinced that that is so. Your vessel is not registered with the Federation. You could be spies."
"I assure you that we are not. Look, I'm fifteen and my cousin and her father are with me…"
By that time Carina had woken up and moved into the co-pilot's seat.
"We must reach the hospital. Our patient may die."
"You are not authorised to make a landing. Do you know anyone who might receive you?"
"Admiral Janeway-Greaves," Carina responded quickly, already close to tears again.
"Yes, Admiral Janeway-Greaves will definitely see us," Tomaso agreed. "Please, could you let us touch down first?"
The lieutenant frowned heavily, looking at the man sitting next to him. Beside him Carina whispered, "Tomaso!They're powering up their weapons!"
"Please, I beg you, hold your fire. We have a very sick man on board."
After a short pause, the security officer said, "Okay, you may touch down. One of my officers will wait for you at the landing ports. Do not try anything until I have contacted Admiral Janeway…"
When communication closed, Carina looked at him, her eyes filling with tears.
"Oh, Tomaso, I hope she'll come soon, or my father will surely die."
************
END PART FIVE