The following is a fairly irrelevant addition to "Timeless," which I
thought did a reasonably good job with Janeway, Chakotay, and Kim, but a
perfectly horrific job with Chakotay's gratuitous love interest. She
compelled me to remedy that situation. Paramount owns everyone in here
but Tessa, since they didn't bother to give her a personality.

RESCUED LIFE
by YCD

So that's what it comes down to, after I've thrown my life away for him:
having sex. Less often than you'd think, Harry. And it's mostly just to
keep me happy - since he found out where the ship crashed, I don't think
Chakotay feels anything at all when we have sex. I won't call it making
love, not any more. What would be the point?

Oh, but it still hurts to hear. Not "They're in love," or even "They
care a lot about each other." Just that flip comment - "Theye're a couple,
joined at the hip." Said with more than a little resentment, even though
they couldn't have done this without me. Yeah.

Oh, Chakotay cares about me, as much as he can care about anyone who
didn't die on that ship more than a decade ago. It's typical Harry to be
so blunt, especially about me - I know he resents their dependence on me
to help with what Harry thinks should be their private salvage mission.
And I also know he's a little jealous - I've seen him looking at me
sideways when Chakotay wasn't around. Sometimes it's even tempting to
see what all that anger disguises.

But Harry's no different than Chakotay. He left his heart somewhere on
Voyager. Maybe with the Borg woman he's having the Doctor dissect. Or
maybe with his best friend's lover; he hates to talk about B'Elanna,
though Chakotay talks about her all the time. She was his second-best
friend. Chakotay can't talk about the other one. Not now. Not since
Harry made him believe it was possible for him to see her again.

I know where exactly Chakotay left his heart. In her quarters, somewhere
between the dining table and the bed he never made it to. I've heard
that last supper described to me so many times, just the thought of
vegetable biryani makes me nauseous. I know exactly what she said, how
she touched him--he made me act it out for him once. He didn't have to
tell me, but I also know what he thought for a split second she was
going to ask him when he agreed to try the quantum drive and she said,
"Speaking of risks..."

He has dozens of illusions like that one. How they almost did it on New
Earth. How they almost did it on Lake George. How they almost did it
their last night in the Delta Quadrant. Except she never wanted to. Even
right here, in the same room as the corpse I'm giving up my history to
rescue, I'm tempted to make a joke about how frigid she is.

I'm not a nice girl. But I've come to atone. To give him them their
lives back.

I'm standing only a few feet away from him when he touches the computer
terminal and he hears her voice. For a moment he looks like he's going
to slide the floor and lie among the bodies, lost like the rest of them.
But he won't...not in front of me. I may be his lover, but I've never
seen him cry over her. He refuses even to look toward her broken body in
my presence.

I suggest a tour just to get away from her - and because I want to see
his quarters, and hers. To see if those ghosts are still sitting at her
table. "Are you with me?" "Always." And he meant it. If she only knew.

Now, he's nervous. Maybe he's realizing that he came back to claim
something that was never his in the first place. That he's sending
himself back for more pain, more rejection. It's too late for me to feel
sorry for him. Has he finally realized what I've prayed for - even
screamed in his face - that she's dead, lost to him for decades, while
I'm right here next to him? I'm not her. I'll never be her. But I'm
here.

God, that sounds trite. But I'm thirty-three years old, and I've wasted
some of the best years of my life with a man who's incapable of loving
me. I'm not here for entirely unselfish reasons. I want my own life
back.

"We don't have to do this," he says.

Oh, yes we do, Chakotay. Or at least, I do.

The killer is that I loved her too. I grew up loving all of them. The
first time I read about Voyager, lost in the Delta Quadrant, all alone,
I became obsessed. I devoured the Starfleet data banks. I read all the
transcripts of the debriefings when the Delta Flyer got back, I wrote a
letter to my Senator when Starfleet called off the search. Oddly, I
never thought about the survivors at all. I met Chakotay accidentally at
the Academy, then pursued him for a year, desperate to hear his stories.
Finally he gave in. He wanted to tell them, and nobody else was
listening.

When Harry showed up with the plan to save them, how could I not go
along? I've wanted to see Voyager for longer than I've wanted Chakotay.
I can't even separate out those two desires anymore. Probably never
could.

So here we are, committed to violating a law that goes deeper than the
Prime Directive: thou shalt not erase the timeline. We're playing God,
here. It should be more thrilling than it is. But nothing's thrilled me
for a long time, certainly not the way Harry thinks - it's hard to have
good sex while you're spending most of your waking hours plotting to
wipe your relationship out of existence. The closest I've come to real
pleasure in months was when I first held that Borg temporal transceiver.
A conduit to the past...to all of them...the hell with being afraid of
the Borg Collective or the Department of Temporal Investigations.

I know the paradoxes give most people a headache, but I've never felt
that way about time. The river flows in many directions. It has parallel
branches and tributaries which dry up, but it always leaves a trace. I
remember the time Chakotay dragged me to Southern California because he
heard they were rebuilding the boardwalk on Venice Beach and he wanted
to reminisce about walking there with you-know-who, even though that
happened in a timeline that never happened. Some of Chakotay's greatest
moments seem to have happened in timelines that never happened. Yet they
made him who he is.

The Challenger's weapons don't scare me. Neither does the fact that the
person I am now is going to cease to exist when we succeed. Because I
know we'll succeed. She's here with us now, she has always been with
him; it's his destiny. I don't resent it anymore.

And they'll always be with me, even if none of them ever hear of me, and
nobody ever knows that I'm the real guardian angel who saved them all.
It doesn't matter. I'll be saving me, too.