Title: Prisons

Author: christinecgb (luberluber@yahoo.com.au)

Web: http://Appelsini.tripod.com/Christine/

Rating: NC - 17 for violence and rather nasty images.

Category: VOY AU J/C

Disclaimer: I borrowed the characters - and I’m so careless with things I borrow!

Summary: In an alternative universe Janeway arrests the Maquis and Chakotay ends up in a prison on Cardassia.

 

Everyone does an AU at some time. Here’s mine. A glass of Saurian Brandy to Liz (“Miss Edith is comma-crazy. She is a bad example and shall have no cakes today!”) for betas, the title and many other fine suggestions. Thanks also to Lin for betaing the original.

 

*

 

“We can stop our whoring and pull the smiles inside”- Wil Oldham, “I See a Darkness”.

 

*

 

Her name is Captain Kathryn Janeway.

 

She is a promising young Captain, having recently apprehended a notorious Maquis terrorist. Admirals and Vice Admirals envisage that her career in Starfleet will be marked by great accomplishments.

 

She is invited to a reception held in honour of the Cardassian Ambassador’s visit to Starfleet. She attends because Admiral L’Chek has made it clear that refusal is not an option. She is introduced to the Ambassador as ‘one of Starfleet’s most effective weapons against Maquis terrorism’. She receives many congratulatory comments and becomes increasingly uncomfortable by each one.

 

When she is finally left alone, she finds a position near the entrance to witness the ceremonies until it is politic for her to leave. On occasion she uses her combadge to request the time. 1530, 1535, 1540… It passes too slowly for her liking.

 

She would have given anything not to be here. If she were an Admiral she could have diplomatically refused as Owen Paris had done.

 

The Cardassian Ambassador shook her hand and told her that his people were grateful for her efforts in curbing the Maquis menace. She tries to imagine her face at that time. Did she look pleased? She was supposed to be flattered. Instead she felt like she had been trapped in a soap bubble, unable to escape when all around was distorted.

 

She tells herself that she cannot blame all Cardassians for the work of a few and that acts committed in a time of war are not acts that speak for the nature of a society but she could not look at the Cardassian Ambassador and not be reminded of that smell of burning flesh and dried blood and that sound, oh god, that sound.

 

*

 

She attends the trial of the Maquis leader, Chakotay. Firstly, to give evidence of the nature of the apprehension of the Maquis ship and crew, and secondly, because something about this man draws her attention, a strange compulsion beyond her interest as his captor that she can’t explain. Perhaps it was something in his eyes when he saw that the Vulcan navigator had betrayed him, compounded by the Bajoran woman who spoke up immediately to reveal herself as a surgically altered Cardassian spy.

 

She’d never seen someone look so lost.

 

In that moment she was sorry. Truly sorry.

 

She had placed them all in the cargo bay under the surveillance of a security team until they got back to Deep Space Nine. A medical team had validated the ‘Bajoran’ woman’s claim and arrangements had been made to hand her back to a Cardassian patrol.

 

She had returned to her ready room disturbed and disquieted, unable to understand what it was that unsettled her.

 

Her First Officer informed her that the Maquis leader had requested an audience with her before they reached the Starfleet station. She agreed.

 

He had stared across her desk with large brown eyes that were sad and empty. Eyes that accused and questioned.

 

“What would you like to speak to me about Mr Chakotay” she said.

 

“My crew are concerned,” he answered, “they would like to know what will happen to them.”

 

“They will be tried as terrorists. They will probably be imprisoned according to their involvement in your activities.”

 

“I have heard that some Maquis prisoners had been turned over to the Cardassians to be judged there.”

 

She darkened at the thought. It was true that some prisoners were exchanged as a gesture of good faith with the Cardassians but these prisoners were usually notorious ringleaders.

 

Ringleaders like the man before her.

 

“You can reassure them this will not happen,” she said.

 

He gave a curt nod.

 

“Mr Chakotay,” his eyes looked up at hers. For a moment she thought she saw trust. “I can’t make that guarantee for you.”

 

“I understand,” he said, and she wished she knew that he did.

 

*

 

At the trial he is stoic and calm. The Cardassian Ambassador insists on the surrender of the Maquis leader to the Cardassian authorities and Chakotay’s Federation representative argues vehemently against this.

 

Admiral Owen Paris, seated next to Kathryn, shakes his head.

 

“He doesn’t have a chance,” he says, “the peace is too fragile. The Federation will do anything to prevent a war. It’s a bad time to be a Maquis.”

 

“A bad time to get caught,” Kathryn corrects him.

 

There is nothing she can do.

 

But she tries. When the man with the dark eyes and soft voice is taken to Cardassia to serve his sentence in a Cardassian prison she lodges a formal protest along with many other Starfleet personnel who are outraged at the Federation’s treatment of the Maquis.

 

“You are far too emotionally involved with this case,” Admiral L’Chek reprimands her, “we have the Cardassians’ word that Federation prisoners will be treated humanely.”

 

But you weren’t there, she tells him silently. She can still see the cell and feel the cold floor jarring her body as she is thrown against it. And she can still hear the screams only now she hears Chakotay making them.

 

When she sleeps she still hears him.

 

*

Captain Kathryn Janeway is a decorated war hero whose efforts during the Dominion War are now legendary.

 

She wanders the Bajoran streets alone amidst immense celebrations that mark the end of the war and the triumph of the Bajoran emissary. Alone because the crew has places to go, people to be reunited with. She had someone once too, but her fiancé left soon after the trial of the Maquis terrorist.

 

“Sometimes,” he had said, “I don’t think you even know I’m here.”

 

She didn’t mean to be a war hero. She piloted a shuttle into the main power reactor of a Jem Hadar ammunitions facility. She set the warp core to overload upon impact and steered the shuttle manually through a cloud of volatile theta radiation.

 

Lieutenant Kim had gone wide-eyed when she announced her intentions.

 

“I’ll never be able to keep a pattern lock on you with all that theta radiation, Captain,” he said.

 

“I have faith in you, Lieutenant,” she said. She patted him on the shoulder and left the bridge.

 

She momentarily felt guilty that she had left Harry Kim with such a burden on his young shoulders. Tuvok would probably have told her the odds of Harry accomplishing such a feat if she’d waited around any longer. One in one hundred? One in two hundred?

 

But she didn’t want to feel guilty anymore.

 

Moments before the shuttle ploughed into the reactor she felt the familiar tingle of a transport beam.

 

I’ll be damned, she thought to herself.

 

*

 

She enjoys the feel of the crowd around her. They are nameless, faceless. Up ahead she can see a cluster of Starfleet grey and she veers into a bar to avoid them.

 

The bar, like the streets, is crowded. There are many faces, many species, many different types of drinks and she stays because it reminds her of being a cadet. There is very little that makes her feel that young, that innocent these days.

 

She goes to the bar and orders a drink, Saurian brandy. She heard it was Kirk’s favourite. She’d heard Kirk was almost pathological in his determination to be on the right side of every situation. Maybe she would have liked Kirk. Maybe she would have found herself repressing an urge to phaser him on the spot. Could anyone really live around someone like that? Someone who was always right?

 

A group of Bajorans are singing. Her translator is confused by the melody and hence the words are garbled. She thinks it is about the Emissary. She hears one or two lines, “… he who trusts in us as we trust in him …” she can’t tell.

 

She orders another drink. And another. The brandy is warm and the noise is comforting. If only she had died out there. In space. She wouldn’t need this.

 

 

Later she finds strong hands lifting her from her seat and guiding her to the door. She protests. She must notify Voyager. She lifts her hand to her combadge but there is nothing there. She goes with the stranger because he seems to know where they are going. Strong hands that seem so purposeful. He must know.

 

She hears a voice.

 

“Where do you think you’re taking her?”

 

“Mind your own business,” another voice growls back and then she is on the ground, the strong hands having left her to support herself on her own.

 

For a moment she thinks she sees him. The face with the sad, deep eyes staring down at her, holding her head in his hands. Perhaps she has died this time.

 

*

 

When she wakes she recognizes nothing of her surroundings. She remembers a dream. The Maquis man, Chakotay, carrying her home and laying her down on a bed.

 

She raises herself to a seated position and notices that she is, indeed, in a bed. Her head is sore and she knows she has been hit hard.

 

She gets out of the bed. She doesn’t know where she is and she isn’t afraid.

 

A doorway takes her out of the bedroom and into a small living room with modest furnishings. She can see outside onto a balcony overlooking the Bajoran capital. She is surprised to find she is mildly disappointed at having established her location.

 

The back of a man is visible seated on a chair on the balcony. His hair is dark and touched with grey. Somehow he senses her presence and turns around to face her.

 

And he is there, looking back at her. He is thinner and drawn, but his eyes still bore deep into hers with an unmatched strength.

 

He rises and comes toward her. He raises his hand to her head and softly brushes it against the side of her head. She winces as he makes contact with her bruise.

 

“You have a nice lump,” he says pulling his hand away.

 

She is silent. Lost for words.

 

“What were you doing out on your own like that?” he says, “You couldn’t even stand.”

 

“How….” she pauses, grasping for the questions she wants to ask, “how did you find me?”

 

“I live here,” he says, “the bar is less than a block away. I go there…. from time to time.”

 

She notices for the first time a scar that runs from just below his ear to his jaw. She can’t take her eyes from it.

 

“Did they do that to you?” she nods her head towards his scar.

 

He reaches up to run his fingers along the outline of the scar.

 

“This? No. My jailers were far too sensible to leave scars in places where they would be visible to Federation inspectors. I got this during our escape.”

 

“You escaped?” she asks incredulous.

 

“We had little choice. When Cardassia declared war on the Federation we knew our days were numbered. We overtook over a prisoner transport.”

 

She is horrified. She knows he must have spent years as a Cardassian prisoner before the escape.

 

She reaches out to touch his scar, as if by this action alone she could absolve herself. If she could just touch him then she would know how much he suffered, what it is she has to mend.

 

He lets her. When her hand falls once again to her side he offers her coffee. She accepts gratefully.

 

He orders coffees from the replicator and sits on the couch motioning for her to do the same.

 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Starfleet Captain that drunk,” he says, “especially not one in uniform.”

 

She knows it is something of a miracle to be here, with this man, so far from Earth, from Starfleet. She knows, and yet if feels like this is where she is supposed to be.

 

“Thank you,” she says, “for looking after me”.

 

He smiles.

 

“It’s funny,” he says, “when I saw you outside the bar, I though we must be fated to run into each other. Of all the people, of all places…”

 

He doesn’t finish. Her cup has fallen to the floor and she stares at it with confusion and horror.

 

His eyes are wide with concern.

 

“Are you OK?” he says.

 

She knows that she is not. She hears the screams and smells the blood. The taste of the coffee has turned to the taste of bile that was stuck in her throat throughout the torturous hours in that cell. Only now when she hears the screams she hears Chakotay and she knows she sent him there.

 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

 

He is confused, surprised. He notices she is shaking and reaches out to steady her, to reassure her. He is not sure why but he knows that she needs him.

 

He pulls her toward him and she rests her forehead on his shoulder.

 

“You don’t understand,” she says “I was there… and I know ……… I know what they did to you…”

 

“I know Kathryn,” he says and he strokes her hair, “it’s all in the past now.”

 

She cannot explain but she wants to be there. Be with him. As if that could change what has happened and all that has passed before them.

 

It seems inevitable that he should press his lips against her neck. That he should hold her face in his hands, press kisses against her face, that he should let his hand slide down her neck and unzip her undershirt. That she should kiss him back, and feel his ribs underneath the softness of his shirt until her hands want more and she wants more, and she pulls him down on top of her so that he can move into her.

 

And she can take it all away from him now. She can take it all back.

 

Later he is apologetic, searching desperately for reasons, explanations. He tells her he remembers her from the trial, that he thinks he might have known then. He tells her he thought about her in prison.

 

She tells him she has never met anyone like him, and she knows she never will again.

 

The Bajoran sun is streaming in through the windows and the apartment is warm. They lay together for some time basking in an unfamiliar feeling of singularity, of having found a center in the chaos.

 

*

Kathryn Janeway chooses to be the sum of events and histories that have gone before her. She knows that there are some things that happen in life that are the result of an infinite amount of situations and past occurrences. Somehow it all converges on one event. One moment in time, the way a landscape painting converges on a point in the skyline.

 

And when it is gone, the lines diverge once again to separate into the vastness of space and time.

 

*

 

She has to leave him, of course. She tells him she must return to her ship and he lets her go. She says “Goodbye” and tries not to imbue it with the finality she feels.

 

When she is gone he turns back to his empty apartment. With his head in his hands he tries to understand what has happened.

 

*

 

His name is Chakotay.

 

He is a former Starfleet Officer turned renegade Maquis leader. An escapee of a Cardassian prison, pardoned by the Federation.

 

It has been ten years since he last set foot on Earth.

 

His cousin cries when she sees him. He is her only living relative and he has deprived her of her extended family too long. He promises her he will stay.

 

He arranges to meet and old adversary whom he has since learnt he misjudged. He meets Tom Paris in a bar in France on the Seine.

 

He uses the opportunity to apologise, but the older and wiser Tom Paris is long past the need to be absolved. He thanks Chakotay for his consideration but reassures him he has long forgotten the incident. The Dominion war has been the cause of so many changes he has trouble remembering life before it.

 

He is more intuitive than he used to be.

 

“Is there something I can do for you, Chakotay?” he asks.

 

Chakotay shuffles slightly in his chair.

 

“I’m sorry Tom, I had an ulterior motive for seeing you.”

 

Tom nods, an encouragement. He understands.

 

“I was hoping you could tell me the whereabouts of your former Captain, Kathryn Janeway”.

 

Tom pauses for a moment to reflect and formulate his answer. If he is surprised by the question it does not show.

 

“Kathryn Janeway” he says “has been listed by Starfleet as officially missing for the last four years”.

 

“What happened?” he asks.

 

“A month after the war was over, Voyager was ordered to escort a group of Romulans from Bajor to Romulus. She took a shuttle from Voyager to Bajor, but she never reached the planet. The Shuttle exploded from a stressed hull fracture but no human life signs were detected amongst the remains. The transport had been activated but we never found where she transported to.”

 

Tom remembers how they tried for weeks to find her, how he was the one who broke the news to her family. Her mother had looked at him with an expression fixed in stone.

 

“Janeways choose peacetime for their deaths,” she had said.

 

He tried to explain that there was no guarantee that Kathryn was dead, but he had no evidence to support his reassurances. He left and he never spoke to any Janeways again.

 

Chakotay is silent.

 

“I’m sorry,” says Tom. He has no idea what for, but he is.

 

“So am I,” Chakotay answers.

 

When he leaves he imagines her as her last saw her, pained physically and emotionally but still looking, searching for a way out of the prison she had remained in since her first mission. Perhaps now she is truly lost, or perhaps she has just forgotten what it’s like to find home again.

 

*

 

Her name is Gretchen Aubry.

 

It’s been a long time since she visited the grounds of Starfleet HQ. There was a time she insisted she would never set foot underneath the tower of Central Command as long as she lived.

 

But situations change faster than she can make resolutions. One day she has a family, the next she is a widow. One day she has two daughters, the next she has one.

 

And then she has two again. She has a message. She isn’t sure how she received it or where it came from, but she was required to pass it on, and she did.

 

Now she waits. San Francisco is a still-life in oils today. No children roam the grounds and the Academy semester has finished for the year. She sees two joggers run by on the other side of the park but their presence is hardly disruptive. She paints them into the scene too. They fit.

 

Presently a man in civilian clothing joins her.

 

“Were you waiting long?” he asks.

 

“No” she lies. She’s been waiting for years.

 

“Commander Meron believes she has found the communications specialist who encrypted the origin of the message. He’s a Petarian scientist running a black market in subversive technology”.

 

Gretchen nods.

 

“And?”

 

“That’s it, unfortunately. They recognize his handiwork but they don’t know where he is.” As an afterthought he adds, “I don’t imagine he’s going to want to be found.”

 

She looks at the ground. She doesn’t want to seem ungrateful but she knows it could be years before they find her. This man has been so concerned, so caring and until yesterday she’d never even heard his name before. And he had obviously played an important part in her daughter’s life.

 

It was frightening to think that there could be so many things unknown about someone you love.

 

“What do we do now?” she asks.

 

“There’s not much we can do. Commander Meron said she will contact us if she finds anything else.” He looks at her pointedly. “They’re promising they’ll do everything they can. They want to find her.”

 

She is silent. Her daughter is alive. Kathryn is alive. She tells herself this as though it’s some comfort but the truth is that she has been offered first prize and she is now unwilling to settle for the consolation.

 

“Would you like to get coffee?” he asks.

 

 

*

 

The sit avoiding eye contact and sipping their respective beverages. She notices he orders an herbal tea and she wanders if she had expected him to order coffee. As if a man Kathryn trusted so much must exhibit similar traits.

 

“I expect you want to know how I knew your daughter?” he says finally.

 

“I don’t think I need to. I saw the message she sent you”.

 

“It wasn’t like that”.

 

“Like what?”

 

“It wasn’t like anything. I was surprised she sent that message to me - of all people”. There must have been others who would be desperate to know she was all right. Her crew, Admiral Paris and his son…

 

“Can I ask you something, Mr Chakotay?”

 

“Anything”.

 

He smiles at her and she smiles back approving of his trust. Such a warm person. So easy to be around. Not Kathryn’s usual fare. Where could she have met him?

 

“In your message, what did she mean about hearing ‘screams at night’?”

 

He is pensive for a moment while he stares at his tea. The question is difficult for him. He doesn’t have a ready answer. Perhaps this is not what he expected.

 

He shifts slightly in his seat before answering.

 

“I believe she was referring to some old ghosts. Or perhaps ‘demons’ is more accurate. Something she has yet to exorcise.”

 

“The Cardassian prison?” she asks. He nods somberly and she sighs.

 

“Her father died so soon after that. She was never the same person again. Too much for a young woman to handle. And then there was that trial of the Maquis terrorists…”

 

She stops, dead. She didn’t follow the trial on the newscasts. The Federation alliance with Cardassia made her skin crawl, and it was killing Kathryn piece by piece. But hadn’t she heard something about the Maquis Leader who was convicted? That he was a Native American from the Dorvan colonies? That he bore the mark of his tribe on his forehead?

 

The pieces of a large puzzle convene upon each other. They slowly slot into place until the picture is complete.

 

“Mr Chakotay, are you telling me my daughter was responsible for sending you to a Cardassian prison?”

 

“Not responsible, no, although she executed my arrest. The Federation and its alliance with Cardassia sent me to a Cardassian internment camp. Kathryn assumed responsibility. She had no need too.”

 

Gretchen looks out the window of the café at the lawn of Starfleet Academy. Beautifully kept gardens of course. This is paradise, after all. Paradise killed her husband and tortured her daughter.

 

She ponders the man in front of her. Had Kathryn visited him in prison? Kept in touch with him all those years? Did she meet him when he was released? Did she help him escape?

 

The relationship intrigues her mildly. Pulls her in for moments and then discards her for more pressing matters.

 

“This bond you share with my daughter, whatever it is, will it help you find her?”

 

“I believe so”, he says.

 

*

 

He isn’t sure what he is looking for but he plays the message again and again. Each time he notices something new. The inflexion of her voice on certain words, the shift of her eyes downward at certain points. It could mean anything. It could mean everything.

 

Her hair is pulled back and she wears a dark green blouse that shimmers with the slightest movement. Her hands are place in front of her, one resting on the other.

 

She says she is sorry, formally, as though she is still in Starfleet, apologizing as an Officer.

 

And then, informally, she apologises for disappearing so quickly after their intimate encounter.

 

She says she didn’t t mean for that to happen and he can’t tell whether she is referring to the disappearance or the encounter.

 

She tells him her dreams won’t leave her in the daytime and until she can silence the screaming at night she can’t come home.

 

He turns the screen off and thinks for a while.

 

He returns to the message the next day. He plays the images in slow motion, focusing his attention on her neck. He pauses the image, enlarging a section and then enlarging again.

 

He turns the message off again and calls up a transport timetable for the Orion sector.

 

*

 

Her name is Narukah Gipum.

 

She’s seen many faces over the years. This one is no different and yet nothing like the rest. It’s always the same and always a surprise.

 

This one is sad, seeking an answer. He won’t find it here but she won’t tell him that. The ones looking for answers are always good customers. They return and return, thinking they will find that which has eluded them so long.

 

He tells her he is looking for a woman and begins to describe his preference. She can meet his requirements. She has something for everyone, every being. She pulls up a holographic image of a woman similar to the one he has described.

 

He shakes his head and she pulls up another. He shakes his head again and she realizes she’s seen his type before. He doesn’t want just any woman.

 

She turns off the holo-projector.

 

“Looking for someone in particular are you?” she says, “Lost your wife to the mind-sex industry?”

 

“What if I have?” His face is so stern. Serious. Honest. She finds him enigmatic. She can feel herself being drawn into his search.

 

“Policy dictates that we not reveal the particulars of our employees to anyone. Particularly family members or spouses they may be trying to avoid.”

 

He thinks for a moment giving little away.

 

“How do you know I’m not just another customer?” he asks earnestly. She thinks he really wants to know. He really is interested.

 

“It’s just a feeling.”

 

His eyes look into hers. She can feel him pleading. Don’t let it end here.

 

“Are you going to show me the rest of your catalogue,” he says slowly and evenly, his eyes never leaving hers.

 

And she does.

 

And she thinks that perhaps she will tell them, if they ask, that he practiced some kind of hypnotism on her. She’s not sure it isn’t the truth.

 

*

 

Her name is a strange memory.

 

A memory she exhumes from time to time and is never quite sure why. She tries it on her tongue and it is an alien language that is nothing like her own. Difficult to pronounce and suggesting a concept that defies understanding.

 

She keeps reminding herself that this is not who she is, just who she needs to be for now. Her memories are like her name, surreal, intangible. She doesn’t fell like she really owns them.

 

But these days she’s never quite sure what is hers and what isn’t. She let her mind out like a hotel room and the guests are never the same two nights in a row.

 

Nandukah told her she could hide her memories, let them see only what she wanted, but she never told her she could hide them from herself.

 

She told her about the cries in the night. The screaming she heard in the dark when she was alone. Nandukah promised her silence.

 

It was never silent, but it was quiet.

 

This one wants to relive her youthful love affairs, her first excursions into the world of sex. He finds her former curiosity and naïve enthusiasm exciting. She is surprised at the detail she calls to mind so many years later. Sometimes they like it like that. The constant tracing and retracing of steps. Some become impatient and skip to something that is clearly remembered.

 

Some want to experience darker moments. She showed one her experience on Bajor with the Maquis terrorist feeling slightly guilty that she had cheapened that memory too, but he had grown bored too quickly and asked her to move on to something seedier. She showed him the time she slept with a Klingon weapons smuggler in exchange for passage without detection to Orion 6. She remembered that it had hurt, really hurt, after a while. He was satisfied with this.

 

Others want to experience her more mundane habits. How she got dressed this morning, how she washes herself, how it feels to wear women’s underwear, how she looks at other women. As clients they are always preferable. Relying more on their own wild imagination than the information they receive via the neural net.

 

She thinks that anyone can be a net-girl. You don’t need a particular type of experience, you just need experience.

 

When her client leaves he hands her a slip of latinum in addition to the standard fee paid at the exit. She is surprised at the unexpected gratuity. She cannot imagine her memory was vivid enough to be sufficiently titillating. She expects that the sole reason for the gift is the wistfulness she feels when she experiences her distant past. No matter how hard she tries she cannot hide that feeling from her recollections.

 

She will do better next time. A client, who feels sorry for her, may offer a little extra at the end of the session, but it is doubtful he will be back to experience such sadness once again.

 

When her next client appears he stands in the doorway a little too long. She thinks he may just be nervous, as some first-timers are, but when he eventually enters she realizes that she not only knows his face, but that she has been thinking about it for some time. She expected this scene. She knew it would be played out eventually.

 

“Hello,” she says. She does not smile. She does not move. She never had an end to this story. She just expected that she would come to it one day. That it would unfold around her like a holo-novel and she would have little say in its result.

 

“Hello.”

 

“You found me?”

 

“You wanted me to.”

 

“Yes, I suppose I did.” She waits for him to say something but instead he watches her. He moves around the room and takes in her surrounds.

 

He indicates the port at the top of her neck.

 

“How does it work?”

 

She touches her neck. It still feels strange there. When it was installed they told her that to remove it was a dangerous operation. She didn’t really care at the time, but she knew that Starfleet medical had removed implants successfully on a few occasions.

 

Not that she believed she would seek Starfleet’s help in the future, but the thought had come to her anyway. Automatically. Her failsafe whether she wished to acknowledge it or not.

 

“It plugs into the mainframe here,” she says indicating an access point. She then pointed to another outlet, “The client connects here”.

 

He fits the outlet points to his ear and just above his eye.

 

“Show me,” he says.

 

She looks at him questioningly.

 

“I will pay,” he says, “I did tell them I was a client.”

 

She leans back into her chair and closes her eyes.

 

“What do you with to see?” she asks.

 

“What do you want to show me?”

 

At first he sees blurred images that are indistinguishable from one another but gradually they become recognizable forms and he realizes he is seeing them, him, from her point of view when they made love in his rooms on Bajor. He feels the dull pain in her head where she had hit the ground the night before, he sees himself rocking back and forth inside her and feels the way she clung to him desperately trying to banish thoughts of despair and loneliness that invaded her thoughts.

 

It is terribly intimate. Too intimate. And yet he stays, not daring to back away now.

 

Then he sees himself at the trial, but he looks different to the way he remembered himself. He looks taller, calmer, more self-assured. He had never been like that, and surely the trial had not been like that. It had been tense. Unsettling.

 

But he sees himself through her eyes, in her memory of the events. He is nobler, more enigmatic, ‘more’ than he’d ever been in his eyes.

 

And then he sees a corridor, long and dark. He feels fear, distress, and pain as rough hands grip her arms and drag her along faster than her legs can keep up. He feels her chin hit the floor as she is thrown against it. He feels her teeth jar and the wind fly from her lungs.

 

He feels the hard tips of their boots connecting with her ribs and is grateful for the ineffectiveness of the memory to re-conjure physical pain. He knows, however, that the fear, the distress and the apprehension never go away. You don’t remember what the pain feels like but you know you’ll kill someone, anyone, before you let yourself end up in that situation again.

 

Then the sound starts. At first it sounds manufactured, because she’s never heard a sound like that before and can’t attribute it to human vocal chords, but gradually she recognizes the frequency and intonation of a human voice. She raises her head and looks around for the source but sees nothing except darkness.

 

She is panicking. At least that is how she interprets her actions later behind the safe screen of memory. Perhaps she reacts instinctively. Reacts the only way the body knows how.

 

She screams and screams.

 

Hands wrench her from the cell. They shove her up against the wall and tear at her clothing. When she is naked they drag her once again by her arms so that he feet struggle to keep up. She is horrified to hear the inhuman sound get louder

 

And then she is there. In the room with the sound and it stops and whimpers in a manner that is also barely recognizable as human.

 

And she recognizes the form making the sound. Admiral Paris, naked and lying in a pool of his own urine, looking like the dead body she had seen in her Academy medical class. Suddenly his back arches and he screams again in howling agony, his voice mutated by abject pain.

 

The detail in the memory is vivid. It is possible to make out the blood and dark bruises on the Admiral’s body, and the image recalls the smell of blood and urine and burning flesh assaulting the nose, making her retch.

 

Her memory is distorted, hazy in parts and clouded by the sight and sound of the tortured Admiral Paris. She thinks the Cardassian torturer spoke to her, told her she would be next and laughed at her horror.

 

But it disappears into nothing. And the darkness. People running. Dogs. The rest is a collection of images that end in a medical bay aboard a starship. A doctor who carefully asks her to remove her robe so that she can check her bruising and a hollow feeling in her stomach insisting she should not have made it out of that place alive and now that she has she won’t be able to feel because her feelings died when her body should have.

 

She terminates the connection. Their eyes meet and they sit for some time, looking at each other from their respective corners of experience.

 

“I’m taking you home,” he says finally.

 

And she goes with him because she is ready.

 

*

 

Her name is Kathryn, just Kathryn now. His name is Chakotay.

 

They sit in the sunlit grounds of Starfleet Medical, Psychiatric Division, where Kathryn has remained a patient for three months since her return and is soon to be released after having made ‘significant progress’.

 

He hands her a book. She looks at it and smiles.

 

“The Emissary of Bajor,” she reads, “you know I met him once.”

 

He smiles. The sun is warm and he notices her cheeks are glowing from its heat.

 

“When?” he asks.

 

“It was…” She breaks off in thought and then smiles at the memory. “It was just before I arrested you.”

 

He smiles too, pleased that the memory is one that she does not find painful.

 

“I hear he disappeared into the wormhole.”

 

“You mean ‘the celestial temple’?”

 

“Yes. I forgot they called it that,” she nods slowly, “how fortunate the Bajoran people are.”

 

“How so?”

 

“Their Gods are real. Their religion is not in dispute. It’s real, alive.”

 

“Would you like that?” he asks, “to have the answers already in front of you?”

 

She thinks for a moment, squinting at the bright sunlight.

 

“I don’t know whether it’s answers I want. Perhaps it is direction.”

 

“Do you think it’s too late to find it?”

 

“Yes. I had opportunity once, but it’s gone, and I don’t believe it comes twice in a lifetime.”

 

He visits her here almost every day. They sit out in the sun and talk and he brings her books and music. He does not touch her and has not touched her since the day she left his apartment when the war had ended. When you’ve been inside someone’s mind, tactile contact is a false intimacy.

 

“What will you do?” he asks.

 

“I don’t know. I need to spend some time with my mother and sister but after that…? Starfleet has offered me a research position. Maybe I will take it.” She looks doubtful. “How about you?”

 

“I’m going back to Bajor,” he says.

 

She nods. It isn’t a surprise. The Bajoran government welcomed the former Maquis and gave many of them housing and positions within the post-war restoration.

 

“Where ever you go, you know I’ll find you.”

 

“Yes,” he says, “I hope you do.”

 

 

 

The end.

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