I had no intention to write this story, but it scrolled through my thoughts one day and I figured I had nothing to lose by writing it down. The narrator doesn't really exist, but if she did, Paramount would own her.

SHATTERED
by Your Cruise Director

Shattered
Like a windowpane broken by a storm
Each time a piece of me lies alone
And scattered
Far beyond repair
All my shiny dreams just lying there
I'm broken but I'm laughing
It's the sound of falling glass
I hope that you won't mind if I should cry
And pardon while I wait for this to pass
Because sweet darling I'm shattered
Into fragments cold and gray
Sweep the pieces all away
Then no one will ever know
How much it mattered
Something deep inside of me
Shattered

         -- Jimmy Webb (Linda Ronstadt)

The man I'm supposed to apprehend grabs me in a choke-hold and holds a hypospray to my throat. He says it's full of poison. I don't believe him, not even for long enough to blame fear for the way my heart starts pounding.

This is a dream. All right, a fantasy. Except it's happening.

Chakotay must know I've read his record. Since joining the Maquis, he's never killed nor deliberately wounded a Starfleet officer. The threat's a bluff. Besides, he doesn't want to kill me. He's not hesitant with the hypo, not afraid of accidentally pressing it into my neck or his own. Whatever's in that serum won't hurt me. His body betrays him.

I hope mine has not betrayed me to him.

When he first appeared on my bridge, I could not say his name. Maybe he thinks it's because of his Starfleet uniform and the familiarity with which he addressed me, but those aren't the real reasons. I've said his name aloud during countless briefings, practiced putting the right emphasis on the middle syllable. But the only time I've ever spoken to his face was during holodeck simulations. And those had nothing to do with my Starfleet orders.

Oh, I'm glad I encountered him on my ship, rather than during a boarding of his ship, or in battle. If Tuvok weren't late reporting back, I would find an excuse to get out of this mission -- no matter the irregularity, no matter the consequences, I owe it to Starfleet to withdraw, even though I sought this out. I wanted contact with the Maquis. An opportunity to bring them in, not for the reasons Starfleet thinks. But I should have realized I'm over-involved. If I had any doubts, they've been confirmed.

This is not like me.

The man I'm supposed to apprehend backs into the corridor while Andrews orders him to release me. I can't say a word. I feel pressure against my throat when the hypospray empties into me, I feel pressure from behind when Chakotay pulls my body against his. Solid and reassuring, as we pass through something that tingles like a transporter. I don't think to struggle until we're on the other side.

He's used up his only threat, the contents of the hypospray. I could throw him off now. As if he can read my mind, his arms tighten around me. Yet there's nothing threatening about the way he's holding me, not unless my impression of his arousal could be construed as a threat. But that's probably wishful thinking on my part. I know he's not going to rape me.

Why does he look at me that way, as if he's my fantasy version of him, a hologram instead of a real live criminal?

I can see Andrews making a futile search for me, just meters away. I do what I'm supposed to, I call for my security officer. Chakotay's voice heats my ear. "He can't hear you. We've moved into a different time frame." He lets me watch, lets the proof of his earlier statements sink in.

Temporal barriers. He's taken me to the future.

He came onto my bridge and started telling me my secrets.

I've been here with him before. But only in my mind.

Since I first saw his personnel photo, surveillance shots of the Maquis, then images of what those Cardassian bastards did to his family, I have been obsessed. Not with the mission, as I keep telling myself, but with the man. I think about him killing spoonheads with his bare hands. I think about what they did to Owen Paris, to Justin, to my father. To my life. Mark doesn't like it when I tell him I imagine going after them. Like it's a sign I haven't moved on. No one in Starfleet really believes the peace will hold, but we're not supposed to think about what will happen when it falls apart.

I don't talk about my fantasies with Mark.

This posting is what my father would have wanted. I stayed in. And Chakotay dropped out. It's what his father would have wanted. Which of us took the braver path, I don't know.

"Do you want more proof?" asks the warm voice behind me. I jolt with guilt as he rouses me from my captive reverie, only a moment, but enough for him to notice. "It's right down that corridor. You just have to trust me."

I do trust him. In fact I trust him enough that I should doubt myself. I'm not sure I believe him about coming from the future, but the temporal barriers seem real enough. If he has an agenda, there's only one way I can think to learn what it is.

Trust him.

"It isn't easy when you're holding me hostage." I wonder how far I'll have to play along. Or if I will recognize the moment when I should stop playing. After a second, he releases me. The second isn't to demonstrate his power over me, or because he's afraid that once free I might run away. I can tell from the way his fingertips slide over my uniform as he lets go, and how close his nose is to my hair.

"Stay or go -- it's your choice," he challenges. He's enjoying this.

Now that I'm inoculated, I can go anywhere on this ship I want, that's what he said. "I suppose I don't need you anymore," I add for good measure, to give him a chance to prove me wrong. His body language suggests he knows I will go with him. I'm standing much too close for someone who's planning to stride defiantly away.

Killing Cardassians is only the beginning of what I've imagined his hands doing. If he is the man from seven years in my future who calls me Kathryn, I wonder how much I've told him about that, a few years from now when I tell him about my dog and the instruments I never learned to play. He looks at me as if he knows.

Then he calls my crew "our people." That shakes me up, but not for the reason he thinks -- he assumes I'm flustered when he tells me he's going to be my first officer. I'm actually relieved. I thought he might be using the joint possessive to imply that in his time, we were together -- not as captain and first officer.

So I overreact. "As far as I'm concerned, we're strangers. Understood?"

"Yes, ma'am."

He might say the words, but he doesn't mean the submission implied, at least not in the here and now. Is that smile around his eyes scorn, or an inside joke? I'm not sure I want to get it. "Temporal Prime Directive," I say pointedly. I don't want him to tell me about the future.

I want him to show me.

Strangers. I know what this man would look like naked, tied to a chair for interrogation. I know what he would look like in the light of a bomb he planted, or lying on the ground asleep, cradling a Cardassian disruptor. I know what he would look like grabbing me and pinning me against a bulkhead with all the ferocity of someone who knows what it's like to lose everything.

* * * *

I'm not sure what to make of the immature, pretty young woman and the man Chakotay says we rescued from the Borg. We're ghosts to them. We died decades ago. That doesn't seem to bother Chakotay. I wonder, does he like me better now or in his own time? Why did he come looking for me, rather than an engineer, or the Borg in the cargo bay?

"'I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost,'" he quotes. My knees bang together and throw off my stride, so I have to stop and look at him. I have that phrase underlined in my copy of Dante's Inferno. That was me, after my father and Justin... It must have been Chakotay, too, after the Cardassians and Dorvan V.

I know why he's quoting it to me even before he admits he borrowed my copy. I explain defiantly, to make sure we both understand, "My fiancé gave me that book as an engagement gift. I've never lent it to anyone."

"Not yet." And he teases me about whether I really want to know our future.

In one of my holodeck scenarios, I start interrogating him in the brig. He tells me nothing, so I try getting personal, to win his sympathy. I tell him my own experiences with the Cardassians. It's like cracking the ice over Justin and my father. He's the only person I've ever told all of it -- not counselors, not even holographic counselors. The last time I ran the program, I started to cry. My phantom Chakotay let me pound my fists against him. He wouldn't let me hurt myself, though. He held me. I didn't program any of that; the computer extrapolated what he would do, based on his profile.

It seems the computer had him pegged. "Your intelligence file doesn't do you justice," I tell him, hoping I don't sound breathless.

Although I need to be alone for awhile, he refuses to let me leave sickbay without him. "As your First Officer, it's my duty to protect you," he insists. I make him argue the case, but he's right. I don't want to walk into my future without him. I call him Commander.

He plays games. He takes me to a holodeck, gets me tied up and forces me to flirt with a costumed fantasy figure. He must have read enough of my personnel file to have drawn some conclusions about me and holograms -- it's not an unusual kink, but it's still considered a kink in some quarters. I'm told Captain Jellico actually recommended disabling erotic holoprogramming on Starfleet vessels, but he was outvoted. Chakotay claims Tom Paris created this Dr. Chaotica, who calls me his bride, but I wonder. The part's familiar to him. It's all too easy to play.

Then he introduces me to the Maquis. His crew. Our crew. Who blame me for stranding them in the Delta Quadrant. When I finally see Tuvok again, he is dying. It's Tuvok from this Chakotay's era, not from my own, a more emotional Tuvok than I've ever known. Did the Maquis do that to him, or did I? My ship is rife with disasters. The more I see, the more I do not want to live this future. Chakotay thinks my panic is because of what will happen to my crew. Perhaps it doesn't occur to him that any competent commander would be afraid to put anyone through what we've apparently experienced. I'm frightened for them, all right, but that's not what scares me most.

I can't tell him that he is what scares me most. His smile. His hands. The fact that he doesn't give me one selfish argument for keeping the timeline, like the fact that his ship would be stranded without mine. The possibility that I believe everything that has befallen my crew is worth it.

Did I come out here to rescue Tuvok, or to save Chakotay? He doesn't sound like he needs saving. But that's after nearly a decade on Voyager. Maybe I already saved him. He says that angry woman is going to be my chief engineer. She's going to marry Owen Paris' son, who's still in jail in New Zealand in my timeline. Chakotay's Maquis are going to call my ship home. There will be children.

The man I'm supposed to apprehend will be following me.

"Are you going to be lecturing me like this for the next seven years?" I ask gruffly, so maybe he can't tell what I'm feeling.

"Don't worry. You'll always get the last word."

* * * *

He tells me about Seska. Though apparently not everything. I realize when I hear the way she talks to him that there are layers upon layers. He was her commander and apparently her lover, and she turned out to be an enemy spy, a spoonhead, everything he despised. It turns me on, watching them together, as if I'm watching a holoplay. I want to watch him struggle with her physically, not just fighting. It's perverse.

I'm not worried, not with that Borg woman and all the others poised to follow me against the Kazon, so it's illuminating when she takes me hostage, holding me the way he did earlier, from behind. "Your faithful first officer isn't going to let you die," she sneers with a sourness that might not only have to do with his command loyalties. I can't see her face, but I can see his. She's right. Chakotay is not going to let me die, not even if it means sacrificing the future.

Fortunately it doesn't come to that.

And when it's over, when I'm about to lose him to my own time, I have to know. Because this might be my one chance, the one thing I can affect now in the future, the future that's his but maybe not mine.

When I encounter this man in the Delta Quadrant, without remembering any of what happened today, we're going to save the Ocampa, integrate two crews, set a course for home and never waver. He says I'll do all that, but captains don't do things like that without support.

He's my first officer. I want to know exactly what he means to me.

"Just how close do we get?"

I can't quite look him in the eye, and my voice comes out more scornful than I intend -- as if I'm embarrassed, as if I'm afraid. Of course I am, but it's of my motives for asking, not his reply.

The way Chakotay swallows his shock that I would voice the question tells me the answer even before he speaks. His voice is tinged with something more complicated than regret, as if there's an explanation he wants to offer, but not to me. To future-me, perhaps.

"Let's just say there are some barriers we never cross."

Barriers we never cross. Not words we don't say, not beliefs we can't reconcile, but physical limitations on our relationship. His choice of terms tells me a great deal, probably more than he intended, though he understood the meaning of my question, or he would have offered me that heart-melting grin and said we were good friends. I have a giddy urge to tell him I'm not a virgin, so in the future he doesn't have to worry about crossing that barrier. But I can tell this is about more than sex to him, or he wouldn't be holding his feelings so carefully in check.

Barriers we never cross. It's not for his lack of wanting, that's obvious to me, so it must be obvious to future-me, too. In the short time that I've known him, he has taken me across every barrier we've encountered. I must be the one who resists, using all the arguments I've already formulated, and can't help formulating now, even though I despise myself for it.

Idiot, I think at myself, for myself in seven years' time. Kathryn, look at him. Touch him. Give him a sign to take into the future you know nothing about -- nothing except that he's there. Come Kazon or macroviruses or telepathic pitcher plants, he will be there. Reach out to him now. Not only for him. For you.

In the end, though, Starfleet wins. The cool rationalism of newly commissioned Captain Janeway, who doesn't let herself think too deeply when there's protocol and regulations to fall back on, doesn't let me. Sounds like she never will. Given what I now know about where I'm headed, I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I wonder whether Chakotay can see the disappointment on my face.

I shake his hand.

"See you in the future."

I go to the bridge. I try not to think about him, nor the absurd sense of loss I feel -- absurd because I will see him again in a few minutes, seven years hence. There's nothing I can do about that future now. It's in his hands, whether we end our days comfortably as colleagues or whether it's not too late to cross those barriers.

His hands, into which I have placed such trust. It does not seem as though he plans to let me down. Ever. I know that's impossible -- in every relationship there are disappointments -- but for now, I will cling to my beliefs.

I will have to trust him once more.

I count down to the pulse. When it hits, I shatter like a bottle of cider hitting the cargo bay floor during a chrono-kinetic surge.

I remember everything.