Chapter Text
Chakotay walked home through the chilly, pine-scented dusk with a few neighbors. Men peeled off from the group when they reached their homes with a “See you tomorrow” or a Yoleni blessing gesture, until Chakotay was walking alone towards the door of his small, three-room house. He was tired, but happy because he was home, and she was there.
The cottage was a clapboarded rectangle with the modular kitchen and bathroom still appended to the back. These modular units—there were living areas, kitchens, and bathrooms that could be linked and arranged in different numbers and configurations—had transformed enormous clusters of dangerous tent cities into a sanitary and less desperate set of “districts” composed of “mods” arranged in rows and rows arranged in clusters. The mods used advanced water and thermal micro-extraction and recycling technologies to provide enough clean water and heat to enable occupants to survive. Following their honeymoon, Chakotay and his new wife had moved quietly into one of these dwellings and set about getting to know their neighbors.
Not long after, Chakotay began digging a foundation, cutting timber, and collecting stones in order to frame out a small, square cottage with a chimney, located just behind their mod and designed to use the various pieces of the unit in the construction so as not to waste anything. He had learned to build simple houses in the commune on Earth where he’d lived with Seven, and had built the cottage they had lived in together. He’d been proud of the house, and proud that he’d been able to provide her a place she was content to live.
Building a house for Kathryn, though, felt different, and he had this same feeling every time he came home and saw the lights on or the fire burning through the windows. This feeling—it had a sweet and primal quality, like the taste of honey raw from the comb. The first time he’d laid his wife down in their bed under the roof he’d built over their heads, he felt a deep sense of connection to a long history of survival, provision, capability. He felt, in short, like a man, and this sense was heightened rather than diminished by the fact that Kathryn was the one who had designed the chimney for optimum heat transfer and minimum waste: this brilliant woman had trusted and loved him enough to follow him to this godforsaken place, and that never ceased to astonish him. Of course, he didn’t really believe that a person had to build a house for a woman in order to be a man, and he was grateful for the twenty-fourth century technology that made survival a much less tenuous proposition for the refugees. But that raw honey feeling was a good feeling, and he let himself have it in his private heart while his beautiful wife gazed up at him, begged for more of him, whispered his name.
It was also true that Kathryn had been more than willing to help him, but him building the cottage alone was part of the plan he and the Grey Moon Council had developed: Chakotay’s activities naturally attracted the attention of the people in the district, especially the men, who had little to do in the refugee camp besides talk and either despair or plot revenge. When they wandered over to ask what he was doing, he would introduce himself and explain, “I’m building my wife a house. Do you have a minute to hold this while I hammer it in place? What’s your name? Do you have a family?” Before long he had met and spoken with dozens of men, many of whom had shaken their heads at what they saw as a crazy activity. Who would be left on the Grey Moon with him and Kathryn when the refugees went home to Rius? They were Rians; of course they were going back. To where? They were waiting to hear where the United Governments of Rius was planning to resettle them. How long would they have to wait for resettlement? They didn’t know. Some were miserable and afraid, and the prospect of staying on the Grey Moon seemed like madness—“I’m an attorney and my wife is an orchestra conductor. What the hell are we going to do here?” one man had said. Chakotay had replied, mildly, that lawmakers and musicians were needed in every society. Others—mostly those whose occupations were of a more practical variety—had nodded their heads, gone away and done some considering of the reality of their situation, come back to borrow tools (of which Chakotay happened to have a remarkably large number, given that he was only one person) and begun building their own homes. Many of both kinds came back to talk more, with Chakotay and with each other, about the possibility of staying put and building a life, a new society, on the “moon”—which was in fact a small planetoid whose name was an artifact from a time when space exploration was conducted with telescopes instead of starships. It was a cold place, with ice caps that covered two-thirds of the planet—hence its grey appearance to ancient stargazers—but habitable in a thick band around the equator due to its active molten core and thick magnetosphere. The plethora of fertile class M planets in the Yol Cluster meant that the lonely little Grey Moon hadn’t been settled until the refugees had streamed off of Yol-7 Rius following what had come to be known as the Eastern Subcontinent Burn, or the Hallian Burn, or just “the Burn,” and the subsequent decision of the Eastern Supercontinental societies on Rius to provide ships to send the refugees away into space rather than taking them in.
Three years in, the Grey Moon had developed into a network of communities—struggling communities, but communities that were beginning to see themselves less as refugees from Rius and more as the founders of a new society. Chakotay had been elected to the Grey Moon Council; he had refused to run on grounds that he had been a key member of the team that organized the elections—but he bowed to the will of a write-in vote.
Tonight, he opened the door of his house to find a neighbor, Paul, heading out. Paul had just been to a recently arrived goods transport and, seeing that a rug Kathryn had ordered had also arrived, he’d brought it over. The light and heat from the hearth streamed out into the chilly, darkening sky as Chakotay stopped to shake Paul’s hand and exchange a few words before going inside, where the rug leaned, rolled up, against the near wall. On his left as he came in was the doorway to their tiny kitchen; across the room on the far wall was their bed, a cabinet, and the entrance to the small bathroom. In the middle of the room, across from the fire, was a low sofa; behind it on the wall to the right was an arrangement that Kathryn referred to as “the parliament of tables”—a small dining table in the middle of the wall below a large window, and their two desks on either side, facing out into the room.
“Hello, love,” said Kathryn warmly, standing over her desk and tidying the schematic diagrams that covered it. Paul’s arrival with the rug must have prompted her to stop working a little early; she was usually still seated at her desk, frowning and scribbling, when he arrived home. He hung up his coat and went to kiss her, and the way the kiss lingered and her fingertips touched his cheek made him a little breathless, as kissing her always did. He put his arms around her and deepened the kiss. She pulled back and regarded him for a moment with a certain look and that was all it took.
That was all it ever seemed to take. Their reunion on Yol-6 Primus, during which he went from “Should we?” to “Marry me” and she from “Yes” to “Yes” in one day, had naturally come to an end with the discovery that ten years of frustration and anger—to say nothing of the unintended and intended betrayals and half-healed old wounds from their seven years of strange adventures—was not going to get resolved in a day. The method both of them favored for exorcising the emotions that erupted, sometimes in unexpected ways, as they tried to forge a new way of relating to each other, was, it turned out, not fighting, yelling, or crying, but pretty-close-to-constant fucking. On the transport back to Earth so they could settle their affairs; just before and again during Kathryn’s retirement banquet (“Please remind me that I’m only forty-five,” she’d gasped in the dark of a broom closet at Starfleet headquarters); on the transport back to Yol-6 Primus, where John had invited them to stay in the admirals’ suite as often as they needed while preparing their move to the Grey Moon; in said suite for hours at a time. They had rage sex and emotion-drenched loving sex and take-me-my-god-how-I’ve-wanted-you sex, sometimes all in the same day. About three months in, they woke up one morning and he smiled at her and she reached for him and pulled him on top of her and kissed him sweetly. Her lips parted in a little happy gasp when he entered her and they had sex like people do when they just love each other, when they don’t have a decade of repression and resentment and self-denial and mind-altered attempts on each other’s lives weighing on their souls. Afterwards, she looked at him for a long time. “I think I’m ready to marry you now,” she’d said.
“Was there a question?” he’d asked, alarmed.
“No,” she’d said. “Just a process.” Then she got up from the bed to shower, her long hair swinging down her back as she put on a robe to go down the hall to the bathrooms.
He covered his face with his hands. “A process,” he repeated, thinking back on the past few months. “If you’re done with your process, can I stop eating six eggs and two pounds of spinach for breakfast every morning?”
“No,” she’d said. Which was the answer he wanted anyway.
But after that day, she had blossomed in his arms in a way that he hadn’t understood was possible, hadn’t ever experienced with a woman before. She seemed to glow with a new kind of joy and confidence, and he was the amazed and happy recipient of all of the light that seemed to spill from her when she reached for him. Their lovemaking gradually began to change from something they fell into when they were overtaken by anger or sadness or swooping, undeniable love, to something more like a place they went together, someplace vast and beautiful and private, theirs to explore, curiously and passionately and endlessly.
“Let me wash up?” he said. “Five minutes?”
“Five minutes. Then I intend to put you up against the wall next to the new rug.”
He went to wash and made sure to be thorough. This was her new favorite activity, and like everything about their almost two-year marriage, it was a revelation to him.
Until very recently, he had refused to allow this particular act, but eventually she’d stopped accepting his ‘no’ without question. “I love your talented mouth from any position,” she’d said. “But when you do it from your knees, I feel…worshipped. I want to give you that feeling. Will you tell me why you don’t want it that way?”
Her frankness on the subject of how she felt unfree to worship him as much as she would like completely disarmed him; it was typical of the straightforward but joyful and open-hearted way she approached everything about their relationship. The reason, he’d at last explained, was that Seska had been particularly liberal with this activity, putting on ostentatious shows of submission to him when she did it. As a young man, he’d found this intoxicating, addicting, almost unbearably so—until he overheard her saying to a friend that she hated doing it, but it kept him “in line.” He hadn’t confronted her, but this had soured him on both the relationship and the act. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to look at a woman in that position again without despising both her and himself. When Kathryn had begun sinking toward the ground in their imaginary New Earth, so many years ago, he had caught her by the elbow, a feeling of nausea roiling his stomach at the idea of looking down in that way at his beautiful Kathryn—or, truth be told, at the captain he knew he had to return to obeying when they left their psychospace. He could not see her in that position, he thought. Not ever.
When he’d confessed all of this and then, after some thought, agreed to let her do it, she had made him feel so loved that he’d cried. “I don’t know you manage to make me feel like a god and like your disciple at the same time,” he’d said later, smoothing strands of hair off her face while she was stretched out next to him, her head on his shoulder.
“I really do worship you, Chakotay,” she’d said softly. “I can’t hold all of it inside; it’s overwhelming. Sometimes…” she hesitated. “Sometimes I think about when we were joined. Not the time in psychospace, but before that. The joining itself. You felt ‘unmanned,’ you said, because we mostly looked like me on the outside. But I felt so…entered. Filled by you. Your tattoo was on my face, for god’s sake. There were times later on when I was not coping well with…us…and I would think about that feeling and it was…” She broke off, but squirmed a little against him, seemingly involuntarily. “Even the pain…“ she stopped again. “I don’t like thinking too much about it now. It troubles me to think that some part of me longs for that feeling. Wants you so deeply that only biomechanical fusion would satisfy me.” She sighed. “Are you shocked?”
“No,” he lied. “Of course not.” This glimpse into a darker current of her personality did shock him, but it also made him want to pull her even closer. Learning her was endlessly interesting, and amazingly, she seemed to feel the same way about him.
Now, dressed in his clean house clothes but unzipped and held against the wall by her hand flat on his stomach, he enjoyed her attentions, but found himself distracted by the possibilities of the new rug. He pulled her up and they unrolled the rug in front of the fire. He tossed a pillow from the couch onto the rug, then pulled her close and kissed her softly, unzipping her dress down the back so it fell to the floor, where her underthings soon joined it. “Lay down,” he said quietly, kissing her neck. “My turn.”
She sat on the rug. “Nice and soft,” she said approvingly, and then laid down in the firelight and looked up at him, her knees to one side, her arms behind her head, her breasts round and full, her hair spilling around her head and curling at the ends into little tendrils.
His heart skipped. “God, you’re a beautiful woman,” he said. He got down on the floor, slid his hand between her knees to open her legs, put the pillow beneath her hips, and teased and stroked her with his lips and tongue while she rested her hand on the back of his head and made little soft moaning sounds.
“Come up here,” she gasped at last. He shifted his body up and over hers. “Take your clothes off first,” she said. “I want to be naked with you in front of the fire.”
“How primal,” he said, standing, grinning at her, and beginning to remove his clothes while she watched appreciatively.
“I like my fantasies done right,” she said, grinning back. “No sense in being halfway about it.”
“Kathryn, is this why you bought the rug?”
“Yes. You’re taking a very long time to get undressed, love.”
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he said softly as he tossed his boxers aside and got down on all fours to hover over her body. “What is it you would like?” he asked, teasing open her lips with his and kissing her.
“You,” she breathed, reaching up for him. “Always always always you.”
“I am always yours,” he said, shifting down and entering her and moving slowly and then steadily and then faster and watching her face as she got closer and closer, and when she contracted around him, arching up into him, lips parted exquisitely, he needed only a few more thrusts to explode.
Once they’d caught their breath and were stretched out in front of the fire, he grinned at her. “So,” he said. “How was your day?”