Disclaimer: All the good Star Fleet stuff belongs to Paramount. I’m just borrowing Chakotay for a few minutes.
Summary: We learn during season seven that Chakotay has a sister who’s written him a letter. This is his letter back to her, telling her about his job, his relationship with Kathryn Janeway, and his life on Voyager.

Letter to Liana-Chakotay Writes his Sister

by Mizvoy

Dear Sis,

I got your letter in the last transmission from Starfleet. I’m glad to hear from you, glad to know you’re healthy. I can’t wait to meet Jose and the twins and just hope I get there before you become a grandmother.

I’m fine. I’m in good health and have important work here. I know you were surprised to hear I’m Voyager’s first officer, but you can’t have been any more surprised than I was when Captain Janeway offered me the position over six years ago. You asked me what it meant to be first officer, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about that. I hope you don’t mind a lengthy discussion, but you know very little about Starfleet or space travel, and I want you to appreciate what I do.

When Federation citizens look at a starship like Voyager, they see a vessel capable of travelling at light speed while carrying hundreds of people and enough firepower to level half of a planet. Starfleet officers know this is true, of course, but they also realize the ship is an incredibly complex weaving of dozens of interdependent systems, each of which has its own peculiar maintenance and repair needs. The loss of one system inevitably reduces the effectiveness of the others and can mean the failure of the ship, and so a starship is ultimately dependent on the people who carefully tend those systems, perform the maintenance, and make the repairs. Starfleet officers think of ships as the crews that tend them more than a huge space vessel, and the ship, to them, is a living being in need of constant attention.

As in any complex society, a crew takes all kinds of people to be successful. Some individuals specialize in a particular system and stay there for fifty years. Most engineers are like that; they love their warp cores and impulse engines to the exclusion of almost everything else. Some prefer to specialize in transporters. And then, there is medicine, security, science, operations, astrometrics, counseling, navigation, and supply, to name a few. Most crewmembers will have two specialties, just to provide some flexibility in the scheduling process and increase their usefulness on long missions. And, while they know how their particular specialties fit into the system as a whole, they seldom think about the big picture.

On any starship, there are only a few who think about the big picture, and on many it’s only two-the command team. From their perspective at the top of the pecking order, they see how the ship’s systems mesh smoothly together, and they also see how their crew blends into a good team. Of course, the captain is always in command of the entire ship, but most of the time personnel management falls to the first officer, while the captain focuses on the ship’s mission. Even so, they keep abreast of each other’s work. They have to keep multiple issues in mind as they give their orders, and many otherwise bright individuals cannot, for that reason, accomplish the task. Remember the one-man band we saw at the circus as children? I sometimes feel like that man!

Because of the sheer breadth of this responsibility, not just anyone can command a starship. Some people think command officers are jacks of all trades, masters of none, but that’s actually a necessity. A captain doesn’t have to know how to fix a warp drive, but he/she has to know how the loss of warp power affects the ship’s performance in every other area. He/she doesn’t have to know how to reconfigure a photon torpedo to emit a polaron burst, but needs to know what damage a polaron burst can do, how long it takes to reconfigure the torpedo, how far away from the ship in must be to avoid damaging one’s own vessel. In fact, commanders work at every bridge station and are quite comfortable stepping in at engineering, ops, security, or helm for short periods of time, when needed. While they’re there, though, they have to keep the ship’s total situation in mind. And, they have to know how to improvise while under fire.

Someone once said that a Starfleet captain that loses his/her cool is not really a Starfleet captain. It isn’t easy to be the one that everyone looks to when the chips are down. When the first solution to a problem blows up in their faces, the captains have to say, “Okay, let’s try something else,” as if there are infinite solutions to every situation. They don’t give up, they don’t show fear, and they never stop thinking. While they see their ship unraveling in front of them, they just keep weaving it back together. They are pillars of strength with impeccable moral character and dedication. In Federation space, no one wields the power of a Starfleet captain in a crisis, and no one gets more respect.

So, when Captain Janeway offered me the position of first officer on Voyager, Liana, I knew exactly what she would be asking of me. I was flattered that she felt I could handle it, grateful for the opportunity to continue to lead my Maquis crew, to lead the Starfleet crew, and to work with her as we kept the ship’s systems functioning and the crew performing to the best of their ability. I had dreamed for years of having command of a ship like Voyager, but I’d had to give that dream up when I joined the Maquis. I wasn’t going to blow this chance.

I’ve heard people describe the command team on a starship as an arranged marriage, but I never really appreciated the term until I became a first officer myself. Two different people, usually strangers, are thrown together into the most complex and demanding jobs ever created, and these jobs require them to work together smoothly as a team no matter how they feel about each other. Not all combinations are successful. I’ve heard rumors about the captain having a couple of squabbles with my predecessor, Lieutenant Commander Cavit, although she would never dream of criticizing him publicly. Most of the time, such conflicts are easily solved. Execs are pretty high on the list for captain and move along soon or transfer to another ship. Once a good team is formed, however, it often stays together for many years. That’s why many first officers never get to the big chair themselves. When a marriage works, arranged or otherwise, it’s too precious to give up.

For the first two years of this never-ending journey, I thought my relationship with Captain Janeway was adequate, at best. She didn’t really trust me at first, turning to Tuvok, the security officer, with many of the issues she should have discussed with me, but I couldn’t really blame her for that. After all, I’d been a criminal when she’d first met me, someone who’d resigned my Starfleet commission and taken up arms against the Federation. Plus, she’d known and worked closely with Tuvok for years and trusted him implicitly. I could only hope that in time she’d come to trust me as well as or better than she trusted him. That was my goal, and I worked hard at it.

I guess New Earth was the turning point. We contracted a disease while on the planet that was incurable and required us to stay behind until the crew found a treatment. Not everyone could spend six weeks alone with another person and come out better friends as a result. The captain is a scientist at heart and immediately went to work looking for a cure. I knew I could offer no help to her, and I am not the kind of person to just sit around, so I focused on making our stay there as comfortable as possible. That is, after all, the first officer’s job-taking care of the crew, including the captain.

Goal-oriented Kathryn Janeway saw my work around the cabin as giving up on our hope to return to the ship, and I think she resented the fact that I seemed happy living there. I understood her position. She was just being the typical Starfleet captain, never giving up, never losing hope, and never letting go. In fact, I admired her for it, in a way. Who could ask for a better leader than that?

Not all leaders can handle defeat, yet one’s character is most clearly seen at those moments of disappointment. There’s nobility in the way some people handle failure, and the captain can be just as good at admitting defeat as she is at celebrating success. Once she realizes that something is hopeless, she lets it go completely and puts all her effort into the next task at hand.

That’s what happened on New Earth. After a plasma storm destroyed her research and her lab equipment, she simply and gracefully gave up, focusing, instead, on keeping busy and joining me in making our stay there as productive as possible. In fact, I think it was the first time she’d really relaxed since we ended up stranded out here in the Delta Quadrant.

I was gratified by that reaction, amazed, really. She even apologized to me for thinking I’d given up simply because I wasn’t able to contribute to her work at getting us back to Voyager. From that day forward, she worked just as hard as I did to make New Earth feel like home. We learned a lot about each other in those weeks, and that knowledge helped us forge one of the strongest command relationships I could ever imagine. Once you’ve “mucked around in the dirt” (her term) with someone, you know what they’re really like.

The crew looks at the captain as if she’s indestructible. She wants them to think of her that way. When the crew believes in their captain implicitly, they don’t panic. She has pulled Voyager out of the fire time and time again, if not personally, then with the example she’s given the rest of us. She is infinitely resourceful, instantly coming up with innovative approaches that border on being insane, yet often seem to work in spite my lack of faith in them. I wonder, sometimes, how a person who is so traditional and such an adherent to protocol can be such a creative, unconventional thinker. I asked the captain about it once in her ready room, and she laughed in my face and sent me back to the bridge without an answer.

They also think she’s totally self-contained. She wants them to believe that, too. She makes many decisions without consulting anyone, and she usually maintains a high level of privacy. Few people on the crew know, for example, that she was engaged when the ship was snatched from the Alpha Quadrant, and even fewer know that the relationship has since ended. They know her father was an admiral, but they don’t know she watched him and another fiancé die right before her eyes while she stood there, critically injured and unable to save them. She’s had a lot of sorrow and grief in her life, but it never shows. It isn’t relevant to her job.

They think she can be totally ruthless and unfeeling in her decision making. That, too, is what she wants them to think. She can be ruthless, but she can’t be unfeeling. She just delays the emotions, puts them aside until a later time, another place, when she can deal with them in private. She’s very compassionate and sensitive to other’s emotions. I don’t know how many times she’s asked me what the crew needs, or what one particular crew member needs. In some ways, she’s very maternal that way. She just doesn’t let herself make decisions on emotion alone. She can’t afford to.

They think she is fearless. That, she is. She has limitless courage, a daring courage, that starts with nothing less than complete selflessness. She would willingly lay down her life for a principle, or another member of the crew, or to right any injustice, and she’d take the ship and crew with her, if she had to. Over the years, the crew has come to recognize when she takes her bravery too far, usually stepping in to stop her before I say a word. My job is to make sure she considers all the other options before she puts her life on the line.

She plays the myth of the Starfleet captain to the hilt. I admire her for it. I aspire to it myself, but I’ll never have the nobility and the grace about it that she has. She knows I watch her perform on the bridge. I know how often she’s simply paying the part of a captain, she even jokes about it, but she trusts me to keep my mouth shut. That, I can do.

The fact is that no captain can truly be successful without a strong first officer at his/her side. While this is true in Federation space, it’s absolutely true out here in complete isolation. For, ultimately, the captain is subject to stress and doubt and fear just like the rest of us. The problem is that the captain can’t show it. At least, not to the crew. That’s where the exec comes in. They say that two people standing back to back can face any enemy, and I agree. The captain and I have mastered the art, even though it means that we can’t ever be face-to-face.

The captain lets me see her vulnerability. I’ve seen her cry many times over the loss or serious injury of a crewmember. Sometimes, she cries just to release the tension she feels or the stress caused by a particularly difficult confrontation. She never cries until all the dust has settled, of course. At first, she seemed embarrassed by her tears, but eventually she believed me when I told her that crying was a healthy reaction to stress. Sometimes, we both cry. We draw on each other’s strength that way, often by just looking at each other. I can’t tell you how often we seek each other out during a battle or crisis. Somehow, just sharing the situation by making eye contact over everyone else’s heads helps us stay focused. We know we’re not alone.

The captain lets herself need me, and I know how much she needs everyone else on the ship. She isn’t as independent as everyone thinks. In fact, she’s very sneaky about staying abreast of the current gossip. I wondered how she did that until I ran into her in engineering one day. She’d been there for hours working under a console until the engineering crew just forgot she was there, working and listening. I’ve seen her sit in the mess hall for the entire lunch shift, pretending to read reports while she eavesdrops on the conversations swirling around her. It’s amazing what you can learn when you listen to casual conversations. And, of course, she has her sources, including Neelix and myself. I’ve never really figured out who the others are, though.

To her, the crew is the single most important factor on the ship and she spends hours thinking about how she can make their lives better, easier, more fulfilling. In fact, she often takes risks to please them. For example, when she let the doctor send his program back to the Alpha Quadrant, she put the ship in a potentially disastrous position simply because it was something the doctor needed to do. Luckily, it worked out and we got the doctor back in one piece. When Seska said she had my baby, the captain insisted that the ship investigate. She does that sort of thing time and again, trying her best to say yes to those kind of requests that come from the crew’s heart.

While many of her decisions seem ruthless and unfeeling, I know better. I’ve seen her agonize over what she feels she must do, and I’ve listened to her as she goes round and round the moral imperatives she lives by. The hardest had to be Tuvix. Two people were lost in that transporter accident, Tuvok and Neelix, and yet a third individual was created, an individual who was an innocent result of blended DNA. Not even the doctor was willing to sacrifice Tuvix’s life to restore the others’ lives to them, yet the captain believed it had to be done. She did it herself. Those kinds of decisions haunt her. She still has a picture of Tuvix in her desk drawer, and I know she thinks about him and grieves for him as the anniversary of his death comes around every year. Captains carry the weight of those decisions around for the rest of their lives.

The fearlessness is a true part of her character. She has more courage than any one else I’ve every known. She never backs down willingly. She never thinks of retreat until she has no other choice. Her attitude toward the Borg is a perfect example. Most people would do whatever they could to avoid the Borg, yet the captain has willingly faced them time and again, even sought them out. She forced the Collective to help us cross their space, she rescued Seven of Nine out from under the Queen’s nose, and she allowed herself to become partially “assimilated” to help the drones stage a limited revolution.

I’ve heard it said that courage is a form of insanity, and that may be true. What she does at times seems insane to the rest of us, but to her it isn’t. She just doesn’t think conservatively. When she left to “join” the Borg, she was afraid. I could see the fear in her eyes as she left the bridge, but she didn’t let that fear stop her. She has the purest form of courage. The ironic thing is that she would’ve been a better Maquis than I was for just that reason.

I’m not sure what the crew thinks of the command team. I’ve been teased about being the captain’s lap dog by some of the more daring Maquis, but I just smile. I know my job is to support her and lighten her load, and if some people see that as being subservient, well, it is. I’m not going to apologize for doing my job. The captain and I know how fragile our situation is out here better than any other person on the ship, so I try not to confront her about her decisions in public, even if she hasn’t had the foresight to discuss the decision with me first. She’s learned better than that lately, in fact. She now makes it a habit to seek out my support and listens better to my advice. She finally accepted that she needs me, needs my support. That’s a big concession from a Starfleet captain. They’re known for their egos.

When the going gets tough, she looks for me. When she feels overwhelmed, she talks to me. When she’s tired and needs a break, she turns her ship over to me. When she needs someone to do the dirty work, she knows I can do it. When she wants to have fun, she can be herself with me in the holodeck, on a planet, or in our quarters. In so many ways, we are equals. In so many ways, we aren’t. When I heard her talking quietly to Voyager not long ago, I laughed, because I talk to the ship, too.

I’ve heard it said that trying times bring crews closer. What could be more trying than being 70,000 light years from home? Of course, we’re close, closer than any Starfleet crew I’ve ever known, and I know that bothers the captain, who wants so desperately to maintain the “distance of command.” When Tom and B’Elanna, two members of our senior staff, got married, I heard the usual rumors about the captain and me. Were we a couple? Were we involved with each other?

The answer is that we are in an arranged marriage, taking the roles that the arrangement requires. We haven’t pushed beyond that. We won’t push beyond that. She’s the closest friend I’ve ever had, bar none. I can tell her anything. I’ve told her things I could never tell you, Liana, and I trust her more than I have any other person in my life. I treasure our friendship and think she’s the best leader I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard people say they’d follow someone through the gates of hell, but, until now, I never appreciated what they really meant. I’d follow Captain Janeway anywhere. I already have.

The captain worries about what will happen when we get home. Will the Maquis be arrested? Will the crew be able to resume their lives? Will I be kicked out of Starfleet? Will she be promoted to admiral? Will she be denied another command? Will she be convicted of breaking the Prime Directive and thrown in jail? I just smile. If I learned anything as a Maquis, it was that there are no guarantees. I try not to worry about something that might never happen. I’ve learned to live in the moment. I do today what I need to do to make sure I’m ready for tomorrow and next week and next year, but I don’t worry about what’s coming. What comes will come.

Will the captain and I remain friends? I hope so. Will we push our relationship beyond friendship? Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is that right now, we’re fine. Voyager is holding together. The crew is well fed and healthy. We’re closer to home today than we were yesterday. And Kathryn Janeway, my best friend, is beside me every day.

Right now, that’s enough for me.

I’ve rambled, Liana, and I apologize for that. Tell Jose and your little girls hello from me, and thank you for the pictures. Next time I write I’ll send you some pictures of me and the crew. Take care of each other. I hope to see you soon.

Love, Chakotay