Broken Hearts
by mizvoy
Chapter 6
October 1, 2378
San Francisco
When Kathryn Janeway beamed into the transport station near Chakotay’s apartment complex, she immediately crossed her arms and looked miserable. Chakotay offered her the warm jacket that was hanging from the crook of his finger without a word of admonishment. Although the weather sites listed the temperature in the mid-forties and warned of a stiff, cold breeze, Kathryn was notorious for failing to check the local conditions before she beamed down to a planet.
“Thank you! And not a word, mister!” she cautioned him as she took the jacket and slipped it on, burrowing her hands into the pockets. “I thought this was October, not the middle of winter!”
“The cold front arrived yesterday afternoon with a vengeance. It was beautiful Sunday.”
“Just my luck,” she laughed, pulling her hands out of her pockets just long enough to give him a brief hug. “It was summer when I left for Phoebe’s, so I didn’t think to pack anything warm.”
He escorted her out of the small building and into the misty fog, noticing the way she hunched into the jacket against the damp chill. He said, “I thought we’d start at the coffee shop.”
“You’re an angel.” She gave him a brilliant smile.
“I know you, Kathryn, that’s all. And why wouldn’t I after living and working with you for nearly seven years?”
They talked incessantly while she drank three huge mugs of coffee, and then they walked the few blocks that separated the coffee shop and his office. He showed her his small cubicle, the indoor gardens, and one of his favorite museums before they stopped for dinner at a well-known exotic restaurant that served, much to their surprise, several Delta Quadrant specialties popularized by Voyager’s fame, including a leota root dish that was much too close to the original as far as they were concerned. When the proprietor realized their identities, he refused to let them pay for their food, and so they autographed a dozen menus for a charity auction, posed for a few snapshots, and then headed for Chakotay’s apartment.
“Do you ever get tired of the notoriety?” he asked her as they collapsed on the sofa facing his fireplace.
“It is just the price of fame, I guess,” she laughed as she pulled off her boots and looked around the room appreciatively. “I love this apartment, by the way, the warm earth tones and rustic furniture. It’s exactly what I would expect you to choose.”
“I guess that’s a good thing.” He put a pillow on the coffee table and gestured for her to put her feet up on it. “I know you want to relax.”
“Ahhhh. Thanks.” She laid her head back on the cushion and closed her eyes. “It’s such a relief to get back to San Francisco. I’m not much of a fan of Alpha Centauri, even if people claim that it’s ‘just like earth.'”
“We’ll probably never enjoy being away from home after our extended exile.” They sat quietly for a few minutes until the comm system beeped from the study. Chakotay moved to answer it. “Excuse me, will you? I’m expecting a call from work.”
“Go ahead,” she answered, stifling a yawn. “I might doze off while you’re gone.”
By the time he returned, Kathryn had stretched out on the sofa and fallen fast asleep. He covered her with a cotton blanket, started some restful music, put a fire in the fireplace, and sat down to study her as she slept. She seemed happy, and she had been unusually at ease with him. It had been months since they’d spent more than just a few minutes together one-on-one, and he wondered whether he should delay the confrontation he’d planned until another time, after their friendship was truly mended.
He noticed that her face was a little fuller, thanks to some much-needed additional weight, and that the dark circles he’d seen under her eyes so often had disappeared. He was sure her work habits hadn’t changed, and guessed that she was benefiting from the absence of stress and overwhelming responsibility. He put his own feet on the table and relaxed, slipping into a twilight zone between waking and sleeping.
Kathryn’s quiet crying awakened him. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was that had awakened him, but then she cried again, and he went to her immediately, kneeling on the floor beside her before he gently shook her shoulder. “Kathryn? Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes in surprise, taking a moment to remember where she was. “I’m fine,” she reassured him, sitting up and brushing her tears away with the back of her hands. “It was just a bad dream.”
“More like a nightmare. What was it about? Something from Voyager?”
“It doesn’t matter. I have bad dreams now and then, although I don’t usually wake up crying.”
No, he thought, remembering their time together on New Earth, when she occasionally woke up screaming. “I’ll get us something to drink. How about some tea?”
“Have my coffee rations run out already?”
“Okay, then. Coffee.” He gave her a box of tissues as he made his way to the kitchen. “You had these kinds of nightmares on New Earth, too, remember?”
Her tone revealed her irritation with him when she replied. “I have bad dreams once in awhile, but who doesn’t? Most Starfleet officers do, I imagine. Nightmares are nothing to lose any sleep about.”
“Very funny.” He set a tray of coffee, tea, and shortbread cookies on the table. They helped themselves to the light dessert in a silence that was suddenly uncomfortable. The easy flow of their early hours together had evaporated, and Chakotay decided that the time was right to ask her about her secretiveness. “When Voyager got home last year, I was sure I knew you better than I’d ever known anyone in my life,” he said, finally.
“I felt the same way about you, and still do. We spent a lot of time together, and I’ve never worked so closely and for so many years with anyone else. There are times when I’m sure I could guess what your next words would be.”
“I told you so much about the difficulties in my life–my troubled relationship with my dad, my guilt over the deaths of my family, my near suicidal fury as a Maquis.” He was making a guess, but he was pretty sure that he would be right. “Yet, in all that time, you never admitted that your nightmare was about the accident.”
She froze, her eyes glaring at him over the top of her coffee mug until she gradually lowered it. “The accident?”
“The Terra Nova. I think XS-647A was its official designation.”
She stiffened slightly, and then slowly and deliberately placed her mug on the table. Her eyes were cold, and her voice had that steely tone that her subordinates knew was a warning to tread carefully. She stood up and walked to the window, keeping her back to him. “I said I’d let you know when I was ready to discuss the accident, Chakotay, and the time isn’t right.”
“Kathryn, when will the time be right? It’s been years.”
“I try hard never to think about it.”
“But you do think about it, don’t you? Every day.” She remained silent. “You can admit it to me. I’ve seen distress in your eyes dozens of times, at odd moments, even when everything was calm and quiet on the ship, and I wondered what you could be thinking about. I thought it might be Voyager’s most recent crisis, or maybe guilt about the crew. But now, I know you thought of the accident, too. Even in the peaceful times, you were uneasy because of the guilt you carried.”
She crossed her arms across her chest, but kept her back to him. “You can’t know that.”
“Oh, no? What about your continuous bouts of insomnia? The nightmares on New Earth? The hesitancy to go on test flights of the Delta Flyer? The tendency to lead any mission that was dangerous? Your tenacity at rescuing any and all members of the crew, even if you put Voyager herself in danger in the process?” She didn’t answer him. “If I’m wrong, tell me so. Tell me what your nightmare was about right now.”
She whirled to face him, livid at his insinuation. “The dreams are just a sign of my personal demons, Chakotay. This is pure speculation, and it’s much too personal.” She picked up the jacket and put it on, and then moved to the sofa for her boots. “This visit is over. Thanks for a wonderful time.”
“I read the report on the crash.”
She looked up at him in amazement. “It’s classified!”
He shrugged. “Not as ‘classified’ as it once was, and I know people. Once research and development stopped working on your father’s ‘warp thrusters’ concept, the report was very nearly declassified. In fact, my source said it would have been declassified five years ago except for the fact that the accident resulted in two fatalities.”
“I’m not so sure the warp thrusters couldn’t have worked properly, but that’s neither here nor there.” She leaned over to put on a boot, viciously pulling the zipper closed.
“It’s a miracle you survived the crash.”
“Did you not hear me?” She put on the other boot and stood up. “I don’t talk about the crash.”
“Did you not tell me about it because you don’t trust me?”
She stood up and looked at the parka, shrugging it off and tossing it aside with an angry huff. “I trust you, surely you know that by now. Trust has nothing to do with it. ”
“Really? I wonder. I told you about the last words I spoke to my father—words of bitterness and anger. I told you about finding the charred ashes on Dorvan where my family’s home had been, and the blind rage that fed my decision to join the Maquis. I’m haunted by those memories, I have nightmares about them, but I find it a relief to share them with my trusted friends.”
“Good for you,” she said as she started for the door.
He circled the sofa, blocking her path to the doorway. “It’s a well-known fact that sharing one’s difficult memories lessens one’s guilt.”
“Well, thank you, Counselor Chakotay. But let me say that fact might not be true for everyone. I thought you knew better than to bring up subjects I prefer not to discuss. For me, retelling the story . . . or discussing it as we are now . . . will only make things worse.”
He took her by the shoulders and looked her right in the eye. “Reliving a terrible memory isn’t easy for anyone, Kathryn. But it’s worse if you still have unresolved issues about it.”
She shook off his hands and stepped away from him. “Unresolved issues? Like what?”
“You feel responsible for their deaths.”
In spite of the defiant look she gave him, her eyes filled with tears. “You can’t know how I feel.”
“I think I can. You feel guilty for surviving when two people you loved died.”
She was trembling as she turned away from him, and he was sure she was on the verge of tears. “The report concluded that the ship crashed because of a failure in the warp thrusters, right?”
“That’s the theory,” he answered.
Her voice was thick with emotion. “I was supposed to be monitoring the warp thrusters, Chakotay.”
“Who says you weren’t? The report says you recalled no details of what happened for several minutes prior to the malfunction. It also said that the problem was a design flaw–something you couldn’t have caused.”
“I know what I was supposed to be doing, but I failed to see the warning signs of such a complete failure.”
“Kathryn, you don’t know that it was your fault. You might have been right on top of the situation and still unable to prevent the crash.”
She shook her head in defiance. “Then I didn’t work fast enough. There should’ve been time to perform an emergency beam-out to the surface.”
He turned her to face him. “You haven’t read the report, have you?”
She kept her eyes downcast. “I don’t need to.”
“Look at me.” She raised her head, but her eyes were defiant, troubled. “Total power loss, Kathryn. Total. There was no emergency transporter available.”
“What about battery power?”
“The warp thrusters sent a surge through the whole power grid that fused the transporter’s buffers. Battery power would’ve been useless.”
She was still unwilling to believe him. “You’re saying there were no transporters.”
“There were no transporters.”
She pulled away and tried to brush past him for the door. “I know better.”
He caught her arm. “Kathryn, listen to me just a little while longer.”
“I know what I know.”
“What you know isn’t based on the facts. I studied the details of the flight recorder. I even had B’Elanna look at it.”
“You what?” She turned to face him, pulling his hand from her arm. “You had no right to show that report to someone else.”
“I needed her help to reconstruct the timeline of the accident. We did dozens of simulations to check out our assumptions, and we think we know what really happened.”
She put her hands on her ears. “This is pointless.”
He pulled her hands away and gripped her wrists. “What the hell are you afraid of, Kathryn? Could you feel guiltier about the accident than you do right now? If B’Elanna and I said, ‘Kathryn initiated emergency procedures three seconds too late,’ would you blame yourself any more than you do now? Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe you’re afraid that you did nothing wrong? Maybe you’re afraid to admit that it was out of your control to save them, and that you’ve spent nearly twenty years punishing yourself over something that was a simple, fatal accident?”
She twisted her hands free. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“You are afraid. You’re afraid to hear the truth.”
She poked him in the chest with two fingers on her right hand. “I’m afraid of nothing, Chakotay, and especially not the truth.”
“Then hear me out.”
She let her arm fall loosely to her side and started back into the living room. “All right. I’ll listen.”
He sat down beside her and kept his voice calm as he spoke, as cool and factual as he would have been if were giving her a routine report on the bridge. “When the warp thrusters malfunctioned, the pilot still had minimal maneuvering power in the aft portion of the ship. But those thrusters were too weak to break the fall of the entire ship, and both your dad and Justin knew it. However, they also knew that the aft thrusters had enough power to cushion the fall of half of the ship, and they knew that the emergency parachute could drop it gently to the surface.
“They worked together to deliberately position the ship so that it would hit the atmosphere at an angle that would break the ship neatly in half along the bulkhead in front of the engineering station. It’s a typical weak point, as you know. They knew the thrusters would fire as soon as that portion of the ship—the part containing you—was in a tail down position.”
She stared at him. “You can’t know that they did that on purpose.”
“The Hyperion tracked the crash with their long-range sensors, Kathryn, and the flight data recorder confirmed what they saw. The only explanation for the ship’s orientation on atmospheric impact is that the pilot and copilot worked together to make sure the ship broke in half.”
She looked away, thinking through his explanation. “You’re saying that they deliberately sacrificed themselves to give me a chance to live? It’s supposed to make me feel better to know that my dad and Justin purposely died to save me? I just feel worse than ever that I did nothing to help them.”
“If the tables were turned, if you were the one with the ability to do something, anything, to save them, wouldn’t you have willingly given your life to do it? Is it so strange to think that they loved you as much as you did them?”
She buried her face in her hands. “I didn’t do anything to help them.”
“Knowing you as I do, Kathryn, I’m sure you were trying to think of something. From where you were in the ship, there was very little that you could have done.” He paused, watching her face as she processed his words. “Do you think they saved your life so you would feel guilty for the next eighty years? They saved your life because they wanted you to survive and find peace and happiness.” Two large tears ran down her face as he continued. “When your half of the ship broke away, it started a nearly vertical descent, while the other section, the one that contained your dad and Justin, continued in an arc. The two pieces fell to the surface several kilometers away from each other. You were too far away to do anything to assist them after the crash.”
She shook her head. “That can’t be right. I remember watching their part of the ship sink in the water. I saw their faces looking at me, Chakotay. I still see their eyes in my dreams.”
“What you see, Kathryn, is a dream. A nightmare. It couldn’t have happened that way.”
“But, I know what I saw.”
He got up and walked to a table on the far side of the room, picking up a PADD and bringing it back to her. “Look at this diagram of the crash debris from the report. Here’s where the aft section landed, and that red dot is where they found your unconscious body. Over here, almost two kilometers away, is where the fore section crashed into the icy lake and sank. Not only was their ship not visible from that distance, you never regained consciousness. There were no footprints in the snow around you when help arrived. You hadn’t moved a millimeter.”
“That can’t be right.”
“Kathryn, you can’t dispute the facts.”
Her hands trembled as she took the PADD from him and studied it. “This diagram is in proper scale?”
“Yes. In fact, that PADD has the whole report on it. I want you to read it.”
She looked up at him in surprise. “Tell me who gave it to you.”
“Admiral Paris. Like everyone else who knows and loves you, he thinks it’s time for you to put this to rest. It’s time for you to come to terms with what really happened and deal with the facts, not speculation or imagined events.”
“You’ve talked to all these people about me? About this?”
“Most of them came to me, Kathryn. In fact, all of them did, except B’Elanna. They knew we’d worked closely for years and they assumed that we’d talked about it. They were hoping you’d found some peace and resolution.”
She looked down at the PADD. “Are you doing this out of some misguided sense of pity?”
“Of course not. Since Voyager returned, I’ve learned a lot about you that you never told me yourself, things that have helped me understand you better than I ever did before. I’ve had to rethink dozens of conversations we had, reconsider all the assumptions I made about you for seven long years. I’ve discovered that you are even more fascinating than I thought you were, and I want to get to know the real Kathryn Janeway, not the one you allowed me to see on Voyager.” He lifted her head and looked deep into her eyes. “I asked you here because I care about you–more than you know.”
“Oh, Chakotay, after all these years?”
“After all these years.”
She touched his face, her eyes luminous. “But now you know how damaged I am. You know that my heart is broken.”
“At our age, whose heart isn’t? We’re spoiled by modern medicine. We heal horrible burns and wounds without leaving a scar. We replace missing arms and legs and eyes so well that others can hardly notice the difference.” He gave her a tender smile. “But the human heart has scars that never disappear, and we’re wrong to think that we can be the same again. You’re a better person for all you’ve experienced, good and bad, Kathryn. It’s all part of what makes you special to me.”
“You can accept me like this? You don’t resent the demons that haunt me?”
“Not any more than you resent the demons that torment me. But, I do worry about you. What do you feel when you find yourself in a snowy, icy environment like the planet where the Terra Nova went down? How do you react when you suddenly spy an iceberg or hear of a shuttle crash?”
She frowned. “Those terrible feelings all rush back at once. They nearly overwhelm me.”
“That’s why you have to continually face those feelings, Kathryn; you have to be ready for them. They can ambush you at the worst possible moment, and you have to find a way to deal with those memories when they force themselves upon you.”
“And how in God’s name do I do that?”
“Well, you could do something like this.” He pulled her into an embrace. For a long moment, she seemed unwilling to respond, but then she relaxed into him and let the tears she’d been holding back flow freely down her face. He whispered into her ear, “You could come to me, or to any one else you trust, and you could tell me that you need a hug of reassurance, and that you need to be reminded that you’re safe and loved and forgiven.”
“Am I forgiven?” Her voice was muffled by his chest.
“Don’t you think your dad and Justin would forgive you?”
She was quiet a moment, and then whispered, “I know they would.”
“Then you have to accept that forgiveness. And you have to be as kind to Kathryn as they would be if they were here.”
She snuggled into his arms, relishing the warmth of his body. “This could become addictive. You wouldn’t get tired of hugging me and reminding me of all that?”
“Of course not.” He gently rubbed her back as he buried his face in her hair. “But first, Kathryn, read the report. And then look at B’Elanna’s reconstruction of the accident.”
Her voice was muffled, her face in his chest. “I can’t bear to read it.”
“I’ll stay here with you while you do, and you can stay here with me as long as you need to afterwards. I want to help you, if you’ll let me. Please, Kathryn, you must do this. Repressed memories are a disaster waiting to happen.”
She nodded and settled against him as she reopened the PADD to the beginning of the report, reading slowly and stopping at times to stare blindly into the distance. Chakotay waited, barely moving, as he watched her work through the pages of raw data and analysis. He worried when her breathing quickened as she came across the more painful details. At long last she laid the PADD aside and turned to him, tears spilling from her eyes.
“Is that really how it was?”
“Those are the facts. There was nothing you could have done to save them,” he replied as he gathered her into his arms again and let her sob into his shoulder, all the while reminding her of how much her father and Justin had loved her, how much they would want her to find happiness and peace, not this constant remorse and guilt.
Hours passed before they drew apart. Exhausted by the emotional trauma of the experience, Kathryn lay down on the sofa and stared at the fire while Chakotay fixed them a midnight snack of soup, fresh bread, and tea. When they finished eating, he sat on the sofa with her head in his lap and listened to her as she talked about the accident and described in horrible detail the recurring nightmare in which she watched her father and Justin die. When she finally drifted off to sleep, he covered her with a blanket and sat in a chair to keep vigil over her.
She looked small and fragile, almost like a child, and when she grew restless, as if she might be having a nightmare, he knelt on the floor beside her, brushing her hair away from her face or rubbing her back as he quietly reminded her that she was not alone. Several times, she opened her eyes and placed a hand against his cheek with a grateful smile before drifting back to sleep. He hoped and prayed that at long last her long journey toward healing had begun.
He hoped she had the strength to get through the rest of the healing process.