XERXES
A Voyager post-Endgame story for Janeway and Chakotay
by
vanhunks
Disclaimer: Paramount owns Janeway and Chakotay, Deanna Troi. No copyright infringement is intended. The planet Xerxes is entirely my creation.
Rating: PG-13
Date: October 2009
Acknowledgement: Mary Stark, for the editing of this story. She does a brilliant job and I must thank her for being available whenever I ask her. These days when I tackle a longer story, I feel I cannot do without her editing prowess.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is an AU story on almost all counts. These is no Admiral's timeline. In fact, Voyager reaches Earth by other means.
SUMMARY: Post Endgame. Voyager reaches the Alpha Quadrant. Janeway is required by Starfleet Command to receive counselling. Deanna Troi is appointed to try and reach this difficult person. The question that is asked in this story: What is the true nature of sacrifice? Janeway harbours something terrible. How will this be resolved?
WARNING: WARNING: WARNING: Angst. I ask respectfully that the reader trust me. That is all.
XERXES
CHAPTER ONE
Deanna Troi breathed in the fresh, crisp air of an early spring morning as she headed towards the building that housed the Federation Counselling Centre. Situated in the vast grounds of Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, the building stood somewhat aloof, visibly advertising its status as a place of quiet rest - a pleasing euphemism for psychological assessment - from a distance. Not a very prudent decision by Command as most patients - she disliked the designation of 'patient' - referred to it as the Command Shrink Tank with the negative labelling frequently associated with 'head doctors'. She often thought that surroundings outside the city and more agreeable to the sensibilities of her clients would produce results that would satisfy her superiors far better than the success rate she currently enjoyed. The Shrink Tank invariably equated with madness or the descent into it. And almost always they arrived
amoured in full battle gear.
'Who could argue with such a point?' she wondered. It was certainly not new to the twenty fourth century practice of behavioural studies. Smiling grimly, Deanna thought that this would not change for another four hundred years either, as every century produced its share of madmen.
Not that her current client was mad.
When Deanna had woken earlier, Will's eyes had been caressing yet tinged with concern as they fixed on her. She'd stared at him for a few silent moments before he spoke.
"You're troubled," he'd said softly.
"You know."
"The merest movement of your eyelids while you were sleeping…"
She'd grazed his morning stubble and silently thanked him for being so understanding.
"I'm not looking forward to my session today…"
It was an unfamiliar feeling, this reluctance to see a patient. But her introductory session had not gone well yesterday. She'd been unable to sense anything that she could use as a lever, a starting point for the real hard work she knew lay ahead. She was a Betazoid, she ought to have no difficulty sensing, at least in humans, what they "were about", as Will would say.
"You'll get through to her. It's early days yet. No one can withstand your charm, Imzadi…"
He'd smiled when he said it, and she realised he was thinking of his time as an Academy cadet, trying to date the shy young junior, one who'd also rebuffed his charms. He'd met his future wife only later…
But Will's words had given her hope, a renewed vigour to pursue her task and face the challenge that awaited her. He always made her feel good, she realised as she entered the building and made her way to her office.
It was already clear at the debriefings that Captain Kathryn Janeway was going to be a difficult subject. Deanna had received her instructions in the week Voyager travelled from DS9 to Earth after her re-entry into the Alpha Quadrant, seven years after vanishing mysteriously and five years after her crew had been declared missing in action or presumed dead. Later, news had filtered through that Voyager was travelling in the Delta Quadrant, on a heading for Earth.
At the debriefings Janeway had been cool, aloof, unflinching, unwavering when it came to certain aspects Deanna herself knew, would have unsettled the greatest officers in Starfleet. The merest pause or flicker of an eyelid had been the only indication that Admirals Paris, Nechayev and Hays had struck a nerve when pressuring Janeway for more precise information. Sometimes during the proceedings, Janeway's eyes had become hard, flinty. Only sometimes. Those had been the times the name of Commander Chakotay was mentioned.
Janeway was nerveless, if she could believe the cynical sneer of a wayward admiral who'd sat in on the debriefings. He was as unreliable an observer as he was devious in some of his dealings with his subordinates, and one who, she'd heard, had been snubbed by Janeway while they'd served as fellow officers years ago on the USS Crimond. He was not to be believed, to be sure, but when she'd met Janeway in her suite the day before, she'd been inclined to believe the wayward admiral.
It was going to be a challenge to crash through the gates of a pair of blue-grey eyes.
Deanna had hardly settled into her chair - a deep, soft leather - when her door chimed. Moments later, Captain Janeway entered. In her new uniform which seemed to mould itself on her body she looked even more remote. Deanna remembered that the Voyager crew had returned in the uniforms that had been Starfleet issue seven years ago. They could not have known that new styles had been introduced, that many things had changed, Earth under attack from the Breen, for instance. So many things had changed in those seven years, from the Breen’s attack on Earth to a new style in uniform. Then there were other things that had remained embarrassingly unchanged - hostile debriefings, court martials, mandatory counselling, corruption in high places. Admiral Harcourt Breve had been stripped of his rank following conduct unbecoming an officer. It was not good to be in bed with the enemy…
Janeway looked aloof, tired, perhaps. Could she not be sleeping well? Deanna wondered as she beckoned the Voyager captain to sit opposite her in a similar large easy chair, then spent a few moments studying her.
It was hard to describe what she sensed was a complex being. Even more so, someone not easily given to opening up, as Deanna had found to her dismay the previous day. Dismayed, but not too perturbed that she wouldn't be able to reach this woman whose eyes pierced her. Janeway was a like a tightly wound ball, a body so strongly assembled that it left no room for feelings, devoid of all substance. Only, the observer was simply aware of this tight coil while instilled with the knowledge that it concealed everything that supported its life - wholesomeness, love, duty, patience, need, compassion, empathy, sympathy, the ability to bleed in the onslaught of life's trials, to have its heart constricted with fear, hate, injustice and pain. Deanna had seen and dealt with such Starfleet officers before. Uptight, imperious, impervious and vicious in protecting the self.
Such an officer was Alynna Nechayev. After completing her sessions with the admiral, Deanna had been drained, her own fortitude in the face of the war of emotions finally unleashed bringing her to near breaking point.
Janeway gazed at her, then straightened her back in the easy chair.
"I want to reiterate, Counsellor, that I am here against my will."
"Then I want to reiterate, Captain Janeway, that I am here to do my job."
"Well then," Janeway conceded, "as long as we understand each other."
For a brief moment Deanna felt as if she were the patient and Janeway the counsellor, quickly parrying the captain with, "Let's resume our session, shall we?"
"What do you want to know that the official logs haven't already told you? Or the debriefing?"
Janeway's lips compressed after she fired her questions. Her eyes held a challenge, her fingers laced together and resting on her lap. Deanna made a mental note of the ornate silver ring on the middle finger of Janeway's right hand.
Something else hit Deanna. Face to face with this woman (Will always referred to her ability as being an emotion sensor), she became aware of a certain unreadability combined with an instinctive reticence to open up and talk. It was going to be harder than she'd thought.
Harder.
Not impossible.
"Being shunted abruptly into the Delta Quadrant with scant alert to the imminent danger your crew would be in. Your initial feelings about that?" Deanna asked, shifting slightly in her chair.
"My first officer died."
"I understand Commander Chakotay is no longer with us - "
"I credited you with greater perspicacity, Counsellor. You know I mean Commander Cavit."
Deanna gave a little sigh, almost embarrassed at her amateurish line of questioning. "You lost Commander Cavit. How did you feel?"
"How did I feel?" Janeway bit out. "How did I feel? There was no time to feel, or to ponder on feeling anything. That…was a luxury…"
Deanna smiled. Perhaps it wouldn't be that hard, after all.
"Tell me about the first moment you experienced this sense of…loss…."
*
That had been the moment Chakotay lost his ship. Nothing, not even losing Commander Cavit and some of her key senior personnel - the ship's doctor, ship's nurse, chief engineer, chief pilot - stabbed her insides like that moment. Loss and being lost. That had been Voyager then.
Deanna's question hit her like a burst of cold air. She had never given it any thought or pondered on it. It was true what she said. Feelings were a luxury she could ill afford. She only knew that it was something sensed rather than given voice or reflection.
She remembered the moment as clearly as watching Deanna Troi sitting opposite her, listening, collecting, discarding and retaining anything that could be of use to her.
Kathryn had looked at Chakotay at the helm of the Liberty, his face wild with heroic intensity, a determination that seemed to project from a cache of qualities that would later define the man she'd come to know. Greater even than the moment on her bridge when he'd pushed his body between her and Torres, defending a woman who was to him little more than a stranger, yet acknowledging her leadership.
She should have known then.
'Known what?' The question, voiced in low tones pierced through the fog of her reminiscence.
The price a man is prepared to pay for freedom. That an act she thought to be self-serving was a real desire to help without counting the cost to himself. A selfless act from a selfless man.
He'd been transported to Voyager's bridge at the last possible second…
She closed her eyes.
From the outset he'd defended her. Until Starfleet had commissioned her to find and apprehend him, she had no knowledge of this man. He'd stood before her and his deference to her rank, her person, instantly established the roles they were to play on her ship. Friendship came not with cool smiles and dinner dates. Friendship was hard won, forged in the crucible of worlds of the Delta Quadrant - for the most part a powder keg of political maneuvering and hostilities.
It was the kind of friendship…
Janeway sighed. She didn't want to think anymore. Chakotay… Her head hurt suddenly from just these first recollections…
"Captain…?" Deanna's voice broke through.
Had she been talking? she wondered, giving the counsellor more information than she wanted to?
Kathryn blinked, feeling momentarily disoriented. Her knuckles hurt, she realised with a pang.
"Was that what you wanted to know?" she asked Deanna.
"It's a good start, Captain Janeway," the counsellor replied.
"I should have known then," she repeated her words of earlier.
"What should you have known?"
"The price men are willing to pay. It is embedded in selflessness. His came straight from his heart."
A pause.
"And?"
"I felt his loss as keenly as I would have had I rammed Voyager into that Kazon vessel."
"Then Commander Chakotay must have weighed his options in an instant…the Liberty being a much smaller vessel…Voyager fitted with the most up to date Federation technology at the time…"
Janeway bristled at Troi's deliberate misunderstanding of her words.
"With respect, Counsellor, I knew Commander Chakotay better than you…better than anyone. I can assure you that weighing options was the last thing on his mind. He was acting in the best human tradition… He needed to disable the enemy vessel once and for all. Which he did…" Janeway sighed again, before she murmured softly, "A selfless act…"
Deanna pondered a moment on her words, then, "Did this feeling of loss stay with you, Captain?"
What was it with this counsellor? Kathryn Janeway wondered. She hated them, and in the past had always managed to best them, even when recovering from the most dire traumas. They picked at her head, tried to get into it and burrow there for information, anything they thought could assist them in their continued investigation.
Now, every time Troi fired a question, like a dart it penetrated her brain to separate into a series of impulses that found their mark where she didn't want them - in her heart. It was impossible to fight, impossible to resist. Refusing an answer would simply delay an inevitability. Something strange, something mystic was filling her, a desire to reveal, yet, cravenly, her head was endeavouring to invalidate any question of a personal nature.
For a few moments she remained absolutely still. She was no longer fidgeting, her hands resting calmly on her lap, a belated realisation that she'd been wringing them together as if they'd journeyed through far and dangerous lands.
Her throat felt thick, swollen, causing pain in her ears. A buzzing started there, lasting several seconds. When it subsided, she knew by the sharp piercing of skin in her palms, of the strength she applied to subdue any reaction by force.
She knew that her lips moved, that her brain unceremoniously complied with the voice of the counsellor, or perhaps, she thought, greater even than Troi, a Voice. It would be just a matter of time before she'd capitulate, albeit with great resistance. Janeway hated time with a sudden, inexplicable vengeance.
"Did this feeling stay with you?"
There was not a time during the seven years in hell that she didn't experience a sensation of loss, of being lost, being lonely. While she led her exemplary crew steadfastly towards their destination, while she joked, cajoled, counselled, mothered, washed and brushed and lived from day to day, while her crew rallied around her in support and loyalty, she felt that emptiness inside her, an emptiness lined with her hubris - feelings of misplaced guilt, self-sacrifice, an idea that once they were home, she'd be the all conquering hero of the Delta Quadrant.
Once, when they were travelling through the void, that emptiness had been intensified a thousand times. She had descended into brooding, self-imposed isolation, hiding from herself, her staff, pondering for the millionth time on how she stranded them all in the Delta Quadrant.
She hid from him.
"Who?" came the voice through the fog.
"Chakotay."
She'd sulked, grandstanding on her principles and Federation laws that drove her forward and a sacrifice borne out of self-interest.
"You wanted to be seen as a hero?"
"A selfish one. One who wanted the glory of the sacrifice and not the pain of it."
"There is pain in sacrifice?" asked the counsellor.
"Do you understand at all what it is to live in the face of real sacrifice? The surrender of the self to a Higher Order and not to appease any human on earth?"
"Do not be perturbed, Captain Janeway. I have seen such surrender. I have worked with such a captain for many years, remember?"
"Then you understand?"
"Only if I am to be apprised of the full nature of it, Captain, through your account of it."
She'd been lonely in the void; it cloaked her in darkness so that all she lost swelled and swelled until she wanted to die from it. The only thing that held her back…
"What held you back?"
"To be remembered for my deeds, my selfless acts."
"But you just claimed that yours were borne of selfishness…"
"He reminded me…"
She'd lapsed into brooding self-chastisement of their situation and he had wanted none of it.
"Just what did your First Officer do?"
"What did you learn from the debriefings, Counsellor? It's somewhere there in your notes," Kathryn bit out sharply.
Deanna Troi continued unperturbed. "The crew mutinied. Went against their captain's express command."
"Then you know."
"Captain, you're wringing your hands. I sense something more than the crew going against their captain's wishes. Rather their loyalty was entrenched as led by Commander Chakotay. I'd like to know what his role was in this…"
"Why? He isn't here to defend his stance, is he?" she said bitterly.
"But you are here, now, to express your view of it, or give an account of it."
"My view, as you seem to be thinking, is flawed. I may not be reliable in my narration…"
"You can be assured that I'll form an opinion. I'll be able to gain a better understanding of your position as decision maker on a vessel stranded for seventy five years in an uncharted quadrant."
There was a long silence in which Janeway tried to channel her warring thoughts, to sift through the debris for anything still whole, intact, for that moment in which Chakotay…
"Captain?"
"He came to my quarters. First he wanted me to join him on the holodeck. I told him to leave me alone…"
Her mind raced to that night she told him that she'd be prepared to remain behind in the void to close the wormhole from the inside once Chakotay had guided Voyager through it. It would then have taken her two years to travel across the void…
Chakotay had stood there, resolute, hands at his sides. Even in the darkened room she could see a nerve in his jaw twitching. She'd rarely seen Chakotay angry. Gruff, brusque, disciplined with his Maquis crew, but angry? She'd never experienced it first hand directed at her. Then he'd just been her second-in-command, viewed with her own almost condescending treatment because he was lower in the chain of command. In the past, she'd casually brushed aside his entreaties that they were in their situation together, that she was not alone.
His anger… She'd blanched at the raw force of it.
"So, once again," he bit out between clenched teeth, "Captain Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager wants to play the sacrificial lamb. How…messianic."
"How dare you…blaspheme in that way?"
"I make no apology, Captain. It seems to me you want everything just the way you want all of this to play out. You want to enjoy wallowing in self-pity and at the same time reap the glory of sainthood."
"My God!"
"You're not alone in this, Kathryn! Never have been! But you constantly behave as if the deliverance of this crew rests solely on your shoulders."
"But it's my duty…"
"Your duty? Duty be damned!" His hands had gripped her shoulders so tightly that she flinched from the force of it. "You're not alone, Kathryn! No one has to make any sacrifice here. Have you forgotten you have a crew who wants their captain with them? There's more to glory than wanting it for selfish gains…"
His accusation had been outlandish, unfair, extreme. That was not what she was about. Her reaction…
"Commander, so help me, I will have you confined to quarters - !"
"And then what, Captain? Elevate someone else to acting captain and Voyager continue through this darkness, leaving her captain behind simply to make her look good?"
Her palm had stung from the slap across his cheek. Chakotay had not flinched, but stood his ground.
It hadn't been the first time he'd accused her of grandstanding. It wasn't going to be the last. His words had cut through her in the same way her ship cut the thick black nothingness of the void. Smooth and cleanly, the knife pierced her heart.
She'd bristled at his callous, insulting criticism of her desire to stay behind to help a race in distress, yet deep inside she knew that he'd been right. Glory had to make way for common sense. She’d forgotten that several heads creating a strategy was better than one stupid command. She'd poked her finger against his hard chest and willed him to step back, but he never budged.
"Get this, Commander. Whatever you and the senior officers are planning to get us out of this mess, I want to be a part of it. Is that clear?"
Only then had Chakotay relaxed. His eyes had changed and the hard planes of his face became less harsh as he smiled, the dimples a welcome relief in the truce they managed to effect. He'd given her shoulders another squeeze, gentler this time.
"Thank you, Kathryn. You're alive, you know? And one day, I can assure you, you will experience the true meaning of sacrifice…"
She'd been struck by the heavy portent of his words.
"Just not now, huh?"
"Just not now…"
*
END CHAPTER ONE