***

There she stood, like a child
With her hair flowing down in blue cascades
Love, lapping at her feet
Life, dancing in a masquerade
My completeness

***

The first time it happens, he thinks that he's going mad. He thinks of everything that he's seen in the last few years, all of the death and destruction and blood and heartbreak, and he imagines that it has all finally culminated in the complete and utter loss of his sanity.

She is attractive, certainly. Her long red hair and lithe little body call to him like a siren of the sea, but he knows that the pull he feels towards her is nothing more than simple lust. A lust that he has felt since the beginning. 

That first moment, that first beat of his heart under her hand, that instant hardening in his pants... it meant nothing. Her smoky blue eyes, flashing with fire as she defended Tom Paris, drawing him in like the proverbial moth to the flame. But that's all it is. The desire to take a woman and have her moving under him in pleasure. He has known her little more than a month and there can't be anything more than desire between them. He won’t allow it.

But she is there, in his vision, standing in the thick forest that he has found himself in.

His spirit guide is nowhere to be seen, and when he first notices the female form on the track ahead of him, he thinks that maybe She has chosen to take human form. His guide has never appeared to him as anything other than a wolf, but he knows that they can take a form as they please.

As he approaches, however, the long red hair comes in to focus before anything else and he knows with absolute certainty that it is her. The Captain. Kathryn.

Chakotay approaches her tentatively, his eyebrows heading up towards his hairline as he gets closer and realizes that she isn't wearing a stitch of clothing. Her hair hides her breasts - can he see a nipple poking through or is it his own wishful thinking? - and her clasped hands hide the curls that he imagines at the apex of her thighs.

"Are you my guide?" He asks, his voice loud in the silent forest around them.

The woman before him smiles in a familiar way; just a little crooked, the hint of mischief, the crinkle of laughter in the cheek, and she shrugs one shoulder. "Not really."

"Why are you here, then?"

She shrugs again. "Because you want me."

Chakotay considers it for a moment - they both know that she is right, even if she is just his minds representation of her - and he frowns for a moment before he pulls her to him.

It's easy to make love to her, to make her come under his hand. He rests back against the stump of a large tree and pulls her back to his front, one hand finding its way under the cascades of hair to cup her breast while the other reaches for the damp flesh between her thighs. He strokes her, uses his fingers to bring her to climax while she cries out his name.

She is not real, he tells himself, and you’re not doing anything wrong.

And he believes it. He believes it for the entire length of his vision and he believes it as she comes in his arms and he believes it as he meets her eyes sadly, an unspoken goodbye catching in the back of his throat.

He could have made love to her then, that first time, but something had held him back. A voice had whispered in his ear that it was wrong to do that without her permission and he had offered her a silent goodbye and pulled himself from the vision before his hormones could talk him out of the gentlemanly act of denying himself.

Chakotay had opened his eyes and looked around the living room that he now called his own, a tell-tale stickiness clinging uncomfortably to his groin. He had thought himself mad. He had thought that her appearance in his vision had been little more than a release of weeks of longing.

He wasn't supposed to long for her, though, not after such a short time. He was supposed to want to fuck her, to push her against a bulkhead and play Maquis and Starfleet. He was supposed to want her on her knees before him as she tried to suck his mind out through his urethra. He was supposed to want her as nothing more than a warm body to ease the ache and give his right hand a rest.

But then it happened again, just a few weeks later.

He sought a vision to find peace from the chaos that their world had become - the Kazon were constantly attacking and the crew were constantly fighting and everything was just so hard - and there she had stood once more, hair falling to cover the slope of her breasts and hands clasped to conceal the dampness that he instinctively knew would be there.

Chakotay had every intention of doing the honorable thing and keeping his hands firmly to himself. He had every intention of quietly apologizing to her - regardless of the fact that it wasn't really her - and explaining his lapse in judgment during the last visit they had shared. Of course, his good intentions had been null and void when she'd smiled at him.

Her smile quickly slopes into a frown when he approaches her. "You look nervous."

"I am."

"Why?"

"This is wrong."

"It didn't feel wrong to me last time." Her frown had morphed again, this time turning into the slow smile of seduction. "I don't think it will feel wrong for you this time, either."

His mouth opens to question her meaning but, before the words can form anything coherent, her small hands have reached for the catch on his pants and her questing fingers have pulled his erection through the part in material.

She uses her hands to stroke his flesh, pulling and caressing and doing everything that he shouldn't want her to do but he really, really likes.

Her eyes hold his the whole time, not wavering under the movement of her hand, and Chakotay is captivated as much by the piercing blue as he is the pale extremities that work to make his toes curl. Her hands are talented, but it's her eyes that make him suck in a sharp breath. Eyes that pant with pleasure and desire and everything he shouldn't see there.

He comes like that, his flesh held tightly in her hand and their eyes locked. He makes a strangled sound that starts with a syllable much like her name but ends in a cry of sheer pleasure. The Kathryn before him doesn't flinch or move when her hand catches the drops of semen. Her eyes stay on his and Chakotay thinks of nothing but that clear blue as he comes, and then as he pulls himself from the vision. He finds himself, once again, sitting on the floor of his living room, an unfamiliar ache in his chest.

That ache only ever dissipates after a vision. Only after an hour spent with her, the remnant of a woman that he can't have and shouldn't want.

But he does want her and he can have her and, so, twice a week, he spends an hour making love to a body that isn't real.

He makes her come under his hands again, just so he can watch her. His lips touch every inch of her exposed flesh that he can find. He tastes her and let's his lips, teeth and tongue work to make her scream. She reciprocates, time and time again, soothing the physical ache while the ache in his soul remains.

It takes months before he can bring himself to be inside her, though. There is that voice, whispering that it is wrong and he is betraying the woman he calls Captain during the day and lover in his dream.

But the woman in his visions is insistent. She wants him, wants to feel him inside her, on top of her, completing her. Chakotay doesn't have the strength to say no to her and he pushes into her welcome and warm body again and again until they both cry out in completion and they collapse against each other, sweaty and sated against the soft grass beneath them. And then she speaks.

"I love you."

It's whispered into his chest, into the dark of the forest around them, whispered from his own mind even though the voice belongs to her. It's everything he tries not to say and he pulls himself from the vision before he has to look into her eyes and explain the pain in his.

Being greeted by the familiar quarters, the sharp pain of longing and the stickiness on his groin, is now something akin to normal for him. It will not do.

Chakotay silently vows that, next vision, he is not going to let her entertain his thoughts at all. He will think of his father or grandfather or mother or sister or anyone else as his hand rests on the akoonah and he will make certain that he is not visited by the spirit of a woman that his imagination has made up.

And it works.

For almost a year, his visions return to what they were. His right hand starts to ache a bit more, but the nude form of She That Should Be His Lover never appears. But then comes New Earth and that planet changes more than just his immune system.

It's after he makes the headboard. After his eyes shine with a non-threatening promise. He looks at Kathryn and he knows that she can see the unspoken; you will be mine.

She's skittish, like a scared animal, but her eyes never back away from the challenge she sees in his and she lets him take her hand and Chakotay likes to think that her eyes hold the response; Soon.

His body hums for hours after she goes to inspect the insect traps. He hums with desire and the promise of the unknown and Chakotay finds himself heading in to his sleeping area in search of release. He's been quelling his desire since they arrived and the heat of her body so close to his and the feeling of her small hand in his and the conversation that happens between them without any words will not be silenced any more. Everything between them pushes at his resolve and he finds himself flopping down on the bed, one hand moving to the fly of his pants.

Before he can lower the zipper, though, a long forgotten voice whispers to him that there is another way. A better way. He is reaching for his medicine bundle before his conscience talks him out of it and he's standing before the nude woman before his sense of propriety will stop him.

She walks to him this time, stopping before their chests connect, but close enough that he can feel the heat that she shouldn't generate. "It's been a long time."

"I know."

"I thought you weren't going to come back."

"I wasn't." Chakotay feels a wave of guilt at the hurt that shines in her bright blue eyes, so like that of a woman that, as he talks to her doppelganger, works to find a cure for them. "The real you doesn't want this."

"You don't know that."

"I do."

The woman before him cocks her head to the side thoughtfully. Her hair rustles against her breasts and he tells himself to ignore it. "Is that why you need me?"

"I don't know." He doesn't, he realizes.

He is in love with Kathryn. That has, over the last year and a half, become fact, even when he visits his world of fiction. But does the physical release that he knows he can find with the naked form in front of him substitute for the longing he feels when he watches a uniformed woman plant her hands firmly on her hips as she tilts her chin defiantly in the air and tell some alien, quite diplomatically, that she will not let them screw Voyager?

The woman before him now, her hair covering her breasts, hands covering her mound... she is a figment of his imagination, for lack of a better term. She isn't real, isn't flesh and blood, can't exist outside of his thoughts and he can't reach her without the aid of the akoonah. She will never be the Kathryn that he wants to share his life with. She will never be the woman that he can hold in the dark of night.

She is, as Tom would call her, a fuck buddy, and that realization startles his erection away. "I have to go."

"To her?"

"Yes."

"If she doesn't want you," The woman before him bites her lip in an achingly familiar gesture. "I'll still be here."

Chakotay nods, once. His throat has seized up, his mouth is completely dry, his tongue feels like it weighs as much as Voyager and he can't force a word out to save himself.

That feeling lasts a week.

With true Vulcan timing, Tuvok comes back for them with a cure just as Chakotay finds his voice again. Just as he is ready to open his mouth and re-re-define Kathryn's parameters, her comm. badge chirps with the words that he wants and doesn't want in equal measures.

Regardless, the next twenty-four hours are a flourish of activity as they try to pack up the shelter in time for Voyager to enter orbit.

Actually, if he is honest, the next week is a flourish of activity and the events back on Voyager are enough to take his mind of what he almost had on New Earth.

Seska's latest web of lies consumes him and the brief image of his son that flashes across the view screen prompts him to seek a vision.

Chakotay's hand rests on the akoonah and he does not care who is there to greet him in the forest, only that there will be someone to listen. He is more than a little relieved with Kolopak is the one he sees when he opens his eyes.

"Father, I have a son." And so he tells of his son’s conception. Of Seska's betray. Of his confusion.

His father answers with a wisdom that was with him in life and transcended through to death. Kolopak speaks and, when his words of the child have been heard and understood, he folds his arms across his chest and fixes his son with a fierce stare. "Now, about this Kathryn..." 

Chakotay tries his best to deflect the conversation and, for the most part, he succeeds. There is not enough time to spend discussing his rather unique sex life with his dead father, so he leaves the vision. He doesn't feel the peace that normally comes from a visit with his father, but he chalks that up to the knowledge that he has a son born of a woman that he wouldn't spit on to save.

He doesn't have time to dwell on the child's conception, though, because he is still trying to come to terms with his mere existence when the Kazon seize the Ship and he finds himself on the baron planet, Hanon, with the rest of the crew.

They do what they can to survive without their technology. They find a cave, some food, water, weapons.

He starts a fire with Kathryn's help and, late that night, he finds himself sitting by her as she takes watch.

"You OK?"

"Fine." She lies, but he knows why she does it. "Tom will be back."

Chakotay doesn't quite have the confidence that she does, but he wont argue the point. "Hopefully before you have to sacrifice any more of your hair."

She touches her disheveled hair self-consciously. "It was worth it."

"Maybe." He knows that the missing hair wont be visible once the Doctor has seen to it, but it doesn't stop the odd pang of guilt. He’s quite fond of that hair. But speaking of the Doctor... "Has Kes had a look at your cheek?"

He can still see a red mark marring her pale flesh from where the Maje backhanded her on the Bridge and she fell straight into his lap. Chakotay quietly thinks that he could have happily killed the arrogant alien with his bare hands for that alone, but doesn't voice the thought. There's no point, she probably has her own list of ways for him to die.

Kathryn smiles at his concern. "It's fine."

"It looks sore." He frowns as she shivers. "And you're cold."

"I'm fine."

Chakotay ignores her protests and moves to sit closer to her, back against the rocky entrance to the cave that they have taken shelter in. "Go and sit by the fire, I'll take your watch."

"Is this guilt?"

"What?"

"You feel guilty about us being stuck here because of Seska." She raises an eyebrow. "If I had to guess, I'd say that you were blaming yourself for everything. And I'd say that you're going all the way back to when she first joined you on the Liberty."

Damn woman shouldn't have been able to read his mind that easily. "Perhaps."

"Don't feel guilty."

Moving his arm around her shoulders, he pulls her to his side and offers what little body heat he has to share. "You shouldn't either."

Hanon, despite being uncomfortably warm during the day, has a temperature that drops down near zero at night. The crew has huddled towards the back of the cave, around the fire, to sleep and keep warm, but the watch position doesn't allow for any of that heat to reach Kathryn.

He knows that there are several other crewmen in the rocky hills near the cave, also keeping watch, and he makes a mental note to have them relieved regularly.

"This is nice." He feels her stiffen against him when she realizes exactly what she's said.

"It is nice."

"And inappropriate."

"Hardly." He pulls her closer to his side. "Humans need very basic things. Food, shelter, water, and the touch of another."

It’s logic worthy of Tuvok.

"Maybe."

"You're human, Kathryn, whether you like to admit it or not."

Her voice is quiet. "I know I am."

"Don't you miss it? The closeness, the touch of someone that loves you, the warmth of another person beside you when you wake in the morning?"

"I'll survive."

She doesn't seem inclined to question the comment about someone that loves her. Chakotay imagines that she already knows, anyway. She is not obtuse enough to miss it, he thinks, and he is not willing to hide it completely.

"Survival isn't enough, Kathryn."

"There are other ways of dealing with loneliness."

He has a mental image of her masturbating and that may very well fuel every single fantasy that he is going to have for the next year. "And are your other ways enough?"

"Sometimes." She shrugs against him and they both fall silent for a moment before she speaks again, her voice so quiet that he has to strain to hear her. "Do you miss it?"

Though he does miss the feeling of waking beside a soft body after a night of lovemaking, her tactile nature seems to be enough to sustain him, most of the time. But there will always be that part of him that wants more from her and he doesn't really need to think about his answer. "Every day."

She offers a humorless laugh. "Such is the life of a Starfleet Officer."

"I'm not Starfleet."

"I gave you back your rank."

"You did. As a field commission. Technically, I'm not Starfleet until Headquarters OK's your decision."

"That's a pretty big technicality."

She's not wrong there. "I'm inclined to take what I can get at this point."

"What are you trying to get, exactly?"

He's never been blunt about it before, never come right out and told her what he wants. It's crossed his mind at times, usually while they have been sharing a meal. He's wanted nothing more than to ask her if she'd lose her pants and lay on the table so he can have the dessert he really wants. It's been tempting, but he's never been inclined to push her into a decision that she doesn't appear ready to make.

Chakotay knows that she has a fiancé back home. Knows that she was with him for years. Knows that she was always faithful. He also knows that she is extremely bad at hiding what she wants and he has seen her look at him with the same dessert-ish thoughts that he has of her.

New Earth, for all of the heartache, saw her let her guard down just enough for him to catch a glimpse of the woman beneath the mask. The one that wants the same damn thing that he does.

Enough's enough.

"You."

As soon as he says it, he's relatively certain that she's about to grab him by the balls - in the bad way - and squeeze until any thoughts of fatherhood he had ever had are dead and buried, right along with his male pride.

Instead, she swallows roughly. "I'm the Captain."

It's a weak and, perhaps, token, protest. "We've just established that I'm not technically Starfleet."

"But you still serve under me."

The double meaning is probably not lost on her, but he can't let that one go. "Kathryn, if I really served under you, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

He imagines her skin flushing and wishes he could see it. "You know what I mean."

"I do." He agrees. "I also know that you're about to tell me that you can't have a relationship with a member of your crew."

"I can't."

Chakotay sighs. "Tell me that you don't want me, this, us, Kathryn, and I'll stop asking." He is met with silence, but that's enough. “I thought so.”

“I’m trying to let you down gently.”

“Sure you are.” Laughing will probably not go down well, but he can’t seem to help it. His amusement dies quickly and his voice hardens with certainty. “When we get back to Voyager, things are going to change.”

“What if we don’t get back?”

It’s the first tremor of doubt that he’s heard from her and Chakotay runs his hand up and down her arm, offering comfort as well as warmth. It’s not often she shows any sort of vulnerability. “We will.”

And they do, of course, because Kathryn isn’t a bad judge of character and Tom Paris and his Talaxian backup come through for them.

They spend three hectic days trying to clean up the mess that the Kazon left, clear away the aesthetic damage to Voyager and her crew. They have a memorial for Lon Suder and Chakotay quietly mourns the loss of a child that may not have been his but still didn’t deserve the fate that found him.

Kathryn, for her part, hides in her Ready Room. She calls it working - and he doesn’t doubt that she actually is working - but Chakotay knows that she is hoping time will make him forget his words to her. Or, perhaps more accurately, she is hoping that he will forget that she didn’t protest.

She’s got no chance of that and as soon as Voyager is taken care of and once again on her way towards the Alpha Quadrant, he rings the chime on her door and walks in carrying a peace rose. She looks up from her desk when he enters and her eyes focus on the rose, refusing to meet his gaze.

“Things are changing.” He tells her.

Kathryn licks her dry lips and stands. He watches her take a deep breath. “You know that this can’t happen.”

“Then why did it take so much effort for you to say that?”

Another deep breath. “I’m the Captain.”

“I know what four pips stand for, Kathryn.” He shrugs casually and moves forward, laying the rose on the desk between them. “I’m just refusing to let them stand between us anymore.”

“Why is that your decision?”

“I offered you an out.” He reminded her. “All you had to do was tell me that you didn’t want this and it would have been forgotten.”

She doesn’t appear to have an answer to that and Kathryn frowns as she moves around the desk, standing next to him. “You’re a member of my crew.”

Chakotay turns to face her and steps forward until they’re inches apart. “Again, I’m also not technically in Starfleet and, thus, this isn’t wrong.”

“I don’t think the Admiralty will agree, somehow.”

“I’ll be happy to answer to them when the time comes. Until then, I’d prefer that we stopped dancing around the real issue.”

“And what’s the real issue?”

“That we’re in love.” He is very casual about it, but he’s had a bit of time to get used to the idea.

Kathryn, on the other hand, frowns at him. “I can’t simply be attracted to you on a physical level?”

“I doubt it.”

“Really?”

“You’re not that shallow, Kathryn. You’re also not denying that we’re in love.”

She shrugs and sighs. “I’m not a liar.”

That’s all he needs and he kisses her, for the first time.

He never kissed the woman in his visions and everything about this is new and wondrous and slightly awkward. Their noses bump and he has to tilt his head more before he can taste her.

Once the angle is right, though, it’s on for young and old.

Her mouth is soft and compliant under his, opening when his tongue pokes at her bottom lip. He tastes her mouth, her scent, her. He fills his senses with her while she does the same to him and he loses himself in the sweetness.

It’s not until she’s pushed his shirt off his shoulders and is working at his pants that Chakotay realizes that she’s clearly moved past whatever reservation she had. His hands move to her uniform and their arms tangle around each other.

First, he strips her of rank, one pip at a time, fingers caressing her neck as he tugs the pips off and drops them to the floor. She seems to understand the symbolic gesture and she presses their lower bodies together in response, grinding against the hardness between them.

Their lips locked, he walks backwards, pulling her with him as he makes his way towards the general direction of her bedroom. Their clothes continue to hit the floor and, by the time they reach her bed, they’re both naked and pressed together and then he’s falling backwards and she’s falling with him.

Kathryn doesn’t seem all that interested in anything beyond having him inside of her. One hand snakes down between their bodies to hold him in her firm grasp and the other supports her body weight while she lifts her hips just enough and sinks down onto him in one fluid movement.

Though he’s had many a thought on how their first time would be, he’s never pictured that it would quite this, well, fast. He’s not complaining, though, and he pushes his hips up to meet hers, joining them fully.

She moans something into his mouth and that’s OK because he moans something akin to ‘love you’ into hers.

Silently vowing to himself that, next time, they will go slow and he will tease her and taste her and make her scream and cry and beg, Chakotay holds her hips firmly and helps her rise and fall on him.

Her movements are quick and it doesn’t take him long to reach the edge. While he holds her hip with one hand, the other moves to her clit and he rubs her in tight circles until she’s coming apart on him and he’s thrusting up into her and losing his mind in the wet heat of her body.

She slumps forward, her muscles clenching around his sensitive flesh and he holds her through the tremors. Their breathing slows naturally and it takes several long moments before he’s able to form anything resembling a coherent thought.

Chakotay holds her body on top of his, hands running the length of her damp back, their bodies still joined in sated pleasure. “Never expected it to be that fast.”

“I did.”

He wont call her on the implication that she’s been fantasizing about him for two years. At least, not yet. “I have a confession to make.”

“Mmm?”

“We’ve done this before.”

“I know.”

“Well, not technically us but me and an almost you. Though I wouldn’t call her an ‘almost’, she was very… wait, you know?”

She shrugs against him. “You taught me how to take a vision quest.”

“I did.”

“And there’s a fair bit of information about it in the database.”

He’s never really considered it before. “I guess there would be.”

“It wasn’t intentional, the first time. After you taught me what to do, I tried to take another vision to help calm my nerves. Imagine my surprise when I ended up naked with you walking towards me.”

“I… what?”

“It was me. She was me.”

“Every time?” Does that mean that they have, technically, been sleeping together since they met?

“Yes.”

It wasn’t completely unheard of to share visions with people, he’d shared with his sister, once, though it was generally uncommon for that person to be on the other side of the wall in his living room. Chakotay wonders if she’s had to master the art of randomly showing up in his visions or it the Spirits have simply been trying to tell them something.

He can’t help but remember everything that he shared with the woman of his dreams. He remembers her whispered words when he’d finally made love to her. I love you. He wonders, now, what would have happened if he’d reciprocated the sentiment then and there. “You realize that means we’re in a long-term relationship now, right?”

She snorts. “Aside from the fact that we’ve only really just started this?”

“That, Kathryn,” He rolls them to the side until she is trapped beneath him and grins down at her, determined that they will go slow this time, “is merely a technicality.”

***

End