Fan Fiction
TITLE: Chakotay's Holidays: Some Like It Hot
AUTHOR: Brenda Shaffer-Shiring
RATING: PG
CODES: C/T
PART: 14/?
DISCLAIMER: Paramount will little note, nor long remember, what I do here. But
they still own the VOY copyrights, so they get a shout-out anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to Diane Bellomo for betaing.
SUMMARY: When they share a vacation trip to Pacifica, B'Elanna reflects on her
past -- and her present -- with Chakotay.
B'Elanna Torres shook her black hair back, then reached for her beach towel to wipe the water from her face. //Nothing like a good swim.// And this had been a great one; she doubted she'd been less than half-an-hour plying her stroke through the crystal-blue ocean waters. She filled her lungs with a deep breath of warm air, and enjoyed the mild but pleasant burning of well-worked muscles.
She had never been to Pacifica before. As a girl she couldn't have afforded it (and her mother would have scorned such soft luxury anyhow), as a Maquis she would hardly have dared visit such a popular world, and since returning from the Delta Quadrant she simply hadn't taken the time for a proper vacation. But after everything that had happened in the past year, she'd felt the need for an extended break from her usual routine. Besides, it seemed very strange to her that her daughter -- child of two of the farthest-traveled Alpha Quadrant denizens in history -- had never set foot on a planet other than Earth.
Chakotay had been the one to suggest Pacifica. As a spaceman for nearly twenty years before he'd joined the Maquis, he'd taken leave on the Federation's most famous beach world more than once, and swore that it lived up to its idyllic reputation. After that, B'Elanna had felt that nothing would do but to invite him to join her and Miral. He'd groused about some research that he needed to finish, then accepted the invitation with a smile that made her wonder if his resistance had been purely pro forma.
Speaking of her traveling companion, where --? She looked around and spotted him and Miral at the water's edge. As Miral watched, he quickly built a sandcastle in the path of the encroaching tide. A minute later, the water flattened the fragile white construct, to Chakotay's mock look of chagrin and Miral's scream of laughter. He moved a step up the beach and began work one more time, to the same result and the same uproarious laughter. Smiling wryly, he picked up the little girl and carried her back to her mother.
"My turn?" he asked, handing over an armful of wet, wriggling, sandy child.
"Knock yourself out." B'Elanna settled her daughter down to the towels and reached for sunblock. Miral was still too young for UV-protection pills, and while her swarthy complexion, like B'Elanna's own, provided some defense from UV rays, it didn't do to take chances.
"Bye, Uncle 'Kotay!" Miral called, waving hugely.
He turned and waved back, tipping a wink at B'Elanna as he did so. His teeth flashed white in the sunlight. "Bye!" Then he ran into the surf, diving like a seal as soon as the water was deep enough.
Brushing the sand from her daughter and applying sunblock with absent skill, B'Elanna watched him swim. His strokes were powerful and competent, rather like the man himself.
It was that sense of leashed power, of unquestioned ability, that had drawn her to him back in her early days amongst the Maquis.
She wondered why she was thinking of that now. Surely the two times had little in common with one another. Back then, he had been tough, hard-nosed, and angry -- save for his surprising control, not unlike B'Elanna herself. Of course, back then he had needed to be tough; they all had needed to be tough. And anger was the fuel that kept them flying, kept them fighting against impossible odds.
She had been asked -- she knew they both had -- what it had been like to be a Maquis, especially a Maquis in the hottest days of their unnamed war in the DMZ. She didn't know if Chakotay had ever found a satisfactory answer to give; she knew she hadn't. How could one ever describe it? A veteran of the Dominion War would understand more than a civilian or an Earth-bound Fleeter, but even that veteran wouldn't understand enough. He (or she) wouldn't understand what it was like to be outlaw, beyond the protection of rule and law -- to be, like the common fly, fair game to be swatted by every hand. To have no safety beyond what you and your comrades could carve out. To know how relentlessly, remorselessly, the odds and the Cardies pursued you, until a clean death might be your best and only hope. Despite all that, to somehow find a way to laugh.
In B'Elanna's memories, there would always be one man who stood in the center of the whirlwind and did not sway: Chakotay. He had been more than the captain of the little cell that operated from the Valjean; he had been its center and its soul.
She was embarrassed now, to remember what a crush she had had on him in her early days as a member of his crew: to her, he had been clever and heroic and consummately virile all at once. She had actually had a hard time speaking to him. And then he had put circuits into her hands and engaged her own cleverness, and she had never been at a loss for words around him again. She was his engineer, and she had -- she EARNED, she DESERVED -- his respect.
He changed her image of herself forever. There were times, in the years to come, when she had doubted her desirability, doubted her ability even to make basic connections with other people -- an ability that she had to painstakingly cultivate as Chief Engineer of Voyager -- but she had never doubted that she had a fantastic talent, a talent that DID make her special, and worthy, and not to be dismissed.
And HE went from being an unattainable love object to something far better: her friend. If privately she still considered him clever, heroic, and virile, she also came to know him as a real person, flawed and vulnerable. Trusting enough to love a calculating, hardheaded woman who later proved to be a spy. Proud enough to try to defeat that woman's plots himself. Angry enough to take his well-justified mistrust of one alien species -- the Borg -- out on a woman who had been their victim as much as their representative. Emotional enough to share B'Elanna's grief over the deaths of their fellow Maquis.
She also came to know his quirky sense of humor, along with the self-deprecating good nature that had let him challenge her, over and over, to a game that he rarely won, simply for the pleasure of their spending time together. (Or at least, she couldn't imagine any other reason he might have; he did have other forms of exercise, and other people with whom he could have pursued them.)
This past year, she had leaned on his strength in a more prosaic way than she could ever have imagined, back in the dark Maquis days where they had begun. She honestly didn't know how she could have survived Tom's infidelity, their separation, and finally, their divorce, without Chakotay by her side.
Yes, he was her friend. Her good friend. Her best friend.
Then Miral interrupted her reverie, demanding lemonade and candy. While trying to divert her daughter's desires to more nutritional fare (briefly, if only partly succeeding: Miral eventually realized that her mother wouldn't concede on the candy until after lunch), and went to the repli-bar to obtain that fare, B'Elanna was far too preoccupied to think of Chakotay.
Then she saw him emerge from the warm blue ocean, water sparkling on his broad shoulders and strong limbs in the sun, and she was startled by a not-unwelcome tingle and a sudden thought:
//So where is it written, that he has to be JUST my friend?//
