Title: Condolences
Author: Dave Rogers
Email Address: daverogers@geocities.com
Series: VOY
Rating: PG
Codes: J/C
Part: 1/1
Date Posted: 24th September 1999
                     
Summary: On Voyager's return, Chakotay performs a commanding 
officer's final duty.

Disclaimer: Paramount are bringing Voyager home. I'm just speculating 
about when they get there.

Author's note: Suz Voy challenged me to write a Chakotay story. 
Here it is.



Condolences



As the senior staff entered the communal area in Starbase 718, 
Chakotay felt a strange sense of disconnection, alone in a noisy 
crowd. On his left, he vaguely sensed Kathryn Janeway fighting to keep 
her head high and her spine rigid for a few more hours, as she was 
greeted with quiet pride by a man he assumed must be Admiral Owen 
Paris. Assumed it, mainly, from the way Tom Paris, over on his right, 
stiffened and took on a glazed look of indifference, belied by his 
unconsciously brushing a speck of dust off his newly replicated 
Lieutenant's pips. All around, returning heroes greeted old loves and 
sudden strangers, and found that seven years had changed everything 
and nothing. Somewhere behind him, he sensed Tuvok quietly greeting 
T'Pel and their children, and a noisy scream from ahead of him marked 
the joyful reunion of the Carey family. Even those who had nobody to 
come home to, they too seemed no longer alone; he looked back to his 
right and saw Tom look into B'Elanna's eyes, look back at his father 
and smile. Was that Ambassador Spock over there, greeting Neelix? As 
the first representative of a Delta Quadrant race to visit the 
Federation, it seemed an appropriate honour. And Seven of Nine, 
slightly mystified, was in earnest discussion with a grey-haired old 
couple. Grandparents? Who knew? But as the torrent of greetings washed 
around him, one thing became clear to Chakotay; he, alone among the 
returning heroes, had no-one to greet him.

It was no more than he'd expected, of course. None of his family had 
survived what Cardassia was now, he heard, referring to as a 
"strategic interest" in Dorvan, and Maquis Captains tended not to make 
too many friends, especially in Starfleet. So he waited and watched, 
holding his mercifully small stack of padds. Janeway had had a much 
larger stack, of course, but Starfleet channels had already 
distributed them more efficiently. Chakotay preferred, as always, the 
more human approach. 

After several minutes of brief smiles, occasional meaningless words 
of acknowledgement from the latest effusive greeting, then quiet 
withdrawals as the Starfleet faithful recognised him as the last 
Maquis raider still at liberty, he started to insinuate his way 
towards the edge of the crowd, a discreet exit in mind. Then he saw 
her; one of the ones he had waited for and hoped against hope not to 
see yet, a face he had last seen back in the Badlands, grimly watching 
her husband leave for another mission. Her face was older, calmer now,
yet somehow missing something without the grim hope that had infused 
it in those desperate days. Chakotay knew why, of course; she must 
have known three years ago, when Voyager had first made contact with 
Starfleet. He knew, too, that he had little to offer her except the 
time-honoured role of commanding officers throughout the ages, so as 
he walked towards her he carefully selected the appropriate padd ready
for the proper moment.

"Janet, isn't it?" He tried to smile, but there were no smiles to be 
found in him today. Not that a smile would have been exactly 
appropriate, of course, for the slight, small, rather mousy-looking 
woman who stood before him. Neither, he supposed, was a frown, so he 
resisted that too at the sight of her Starfleet uniform.

"That's right, Cap... Commander." She stumbled slightly over the rank. 
"Janet Hogan. And this is Bradley. Ken's... our son." 

By her side, previously unnoticed, stood a boy of maybe six years of 
age. At his mother's gentle tap on a shoulder, he dropped his hand 
from whatever it had been doing in the vicinity of his nose, took a 
quick glance at his fingernails, then raised it in a Vulcan salute to 
Chakotay. "Live long and prosper, Commander," he intoned deeply, with 
incongruous solemnity.

Chakotay took a second to react, but quickly recovered, raised his own 
right hand - Tuvok had taken months teaching him to separate the two 
pairs of fingers properly - and responded, "Live long and prosper, Mr. 
Hogan," receiving a grateful glance from the mother in reply.

"He's really into Vulcan stuff," she explained in a half-whisper. "He 
wants to be the first human to go through the rite of Kolinahr." The 
boy clearly heard all this, but affected total disinterest. "Last year 
he was trying to learn all the Rules of Acquisition. I'm expecting to 
have to get him a bat'leth next year."

Chakotay suddenly found he could smile, after all. "Maybe he should 
meet Tuvok. If they get on okay, it might save you the trouble." Then, 
looking around, he saw a replimat nearby. "Would you like to sit 
down? A coffee, perhaps?"

Two coffees and one plomik soup seemed somehow too easy to acquire. 
As Bradley Hogan sat rigidly, drinking his soup with careful motions 
of the spoon, Janet slowly came back to life. "We hadn't planned to 
have any more children until... until it was all over. Not after..." 
Chakotay nodded. He'd never met Ken Hogan's two daughters, but he'd 
heard what a Cardassian infantry platoon had done to them. He'd never 
doubted Hogan's motives in the Maquis after that. Janet continued, "I 
guess it was an accident, if it ever is. I found out a couple of weeks 
after you all disappeared. I knew he wasn't coming back - you know how 
it was."

Chakotay nodded. He knew too well, remembered too many times when a  
Maquis ship went missing for a couple of weeks, and too few when it 
actually turned up again.

"Bradley was all I had left. The badlands wasn't any place to bring up 
a baby, so I..." She paused, trembling, took a sip of coffee, 
continued. "I ran out on the Maquis. Stole a shuttle and ran. I spent 
the next two years hiding, until I heard about the Dominion invasion 
and what they did to the rest of the Maquis."

"We all heard," Chakotay said softly, glancing at B'Elanna in the 
distance. She seemed to be having an animated discussion with Admiral 
Paris, and from the look of absolute composure on Tom's face the 
young helmsman was extremely uncomfortable about the whole situation. 
"It hit some of us hard. Very hard indeed." His bad memories were 
suddenly washed away as B'Elanna smiled, said something more to the 
Admiral, and turned to Tom, her smile deepening in intensity as she 
looked at the man she loved.

"Yes, I can see that," replied Janet, watching him closely. "I lost a 
few friends, but there wasn't anybody left I was really close to. Then 
a few months later, Starfleet security tracked me down. I cut a deal."

His face must have changed as she said it, because her voice at once 
turned defensive. "There were only a few of them left, the Jem'Haddar 
were hunting them down like rats. Starfleet wanted to get to them 
first, and that was fine by me. And listen, Cap... Commander," she 
stumbled over his rank again, "it was the right thing to do. They got 
two, three year sentences. They're all free now. They would have been 
dead!"

Chakotay considered the alternatives, and realised she was right. "I 
suppose the Jem'Haddar weren't interested in rehabilitation," he 
replied with a slight inclination of his head. "It just seems like a 
betrayal."

"And putting your whole crew under Starfleet command wasn't?"

The direction of the conversation seemed to have changed somehow, and 
Chakotay realised that suddenly he was the one on the defensive. "It 
was the only thing to do at the time."

"Same here, Commander." No stumble this time.

Chakotay tried to divert the flow. "Have you heard from any of the 
others?"

"They won't answer my messages. They know what I did. Have you heard 
from them?"

"Not a word." Chakotay felt her stare boring into him, and read the 
meaning in it. "It's like that, is it?" He felt his stomach churning. 
Was there to be no peace for him, then, even here?

He recalled his duty at last. "Janet, when Ken died, I wrote you a 
letter. I'm sorry I couldn't find any other way to deliver it, but..." 
He couldn't find the words, so he used ones he'd heard so many times 
before. "He was a good officer, and a good man. I'm sorry." He passed 
over the padd, and watched her take it quietly.

"It's okay, Commander. I lost him seven years ago. I knew he wasn't 
coming back. I've moved on, Chakotay. The whole of the Federation's 
moved on." Her face took on a look of sympathy. "And you haven't, 
have you? All those years you were still fighting the same battles."

There was a disturbance, suddenly, over in the concourse, a crowd 
milling round the place he'd last seen Janeway. Through a momentary 
break in the crowd he saw her, unconscious on the floor, medics and 
officers alike gathered round in horror. Starfleet won't like that, 
thought Chakotay. They don't like their heroes to act human, to be 
fallible, to be flawed. And then there was the blue shimmer of an 
internal transport. He rose to his feet. "Excuse me, Janet," he said 
urgently. "I have to go."

"Live long and prosper, Commander," repeated Bradley Hogan from 
behind him as Chakotay rushed to the station sickbay.

It took several minutes before they let him in, pacing back and forth 
while an equally worried Tom Paris stood quietly by. It was ironic, 
really, Chakotay thought; here he was, betrayer of Starfleet and 
Maquis alike, outcast and irrelevant, and his only companion was the 
man he had hated for being, seven years ago, what he himself had 
become now. And then the doctor beckoned them in, and Chakotay was 
first to Kathryn's side.

She was groggy, sedated and half asleep. "Chakotay..." She smiled at 
him, a smile he hadn't seen in years. "Don't leave me."

"I'm here, Kathryn," he replied gently.

"I got them home, Chakotay. I said I'd get them home, and I did. Did 
I leave myself behind on the way, Chakotay?"

"It's all right, Kathryn. You've done more than anyone would have 
believed. You just need to rest now."

"I got them home, Chakotay," she repeated, almost deliriously. Then 
she raised her head and looked down at herself. "All except one."

"All except two, Kathryn," murmured Chakotay gently, holding her hand 
like a lifeline. "All except two."


THE END