Disclaimer: All characters belong to Paramount, the order of the words belongs to me.
Rated R for a couple of sentences
This is Living Witness fic, an alternate Voyager plucked from the Kyrians' faulty memories of the Warship Voyager, recounted in the Season Four episode, Living Witness. So this means Voyager's Crew Not Playing Nice. If you still can't place the episode, think of Janeway with deep, dark hair, slouching around in black leather gloves, and Chakotay with a malignant tattoo.
I didn't want to do it. Out of our crew of three hundred soldiers, I was a dissenter, the only man of peace. A lone voice, easily silenced. So fickle, our moral voice.
I stood firm in the earliest days, and spoke out against her often. Janeway was a strong enough leader that she never worried if people disagreed with her. My dissenting voice often irritated her, sometimes amused her. But she never backed down from a challenge, so soon after Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant, she made me her first officer. I rejected the offer at first, telling her I could never be the man she wanted me to be.
She moved closer, and her eyes raked over me from head to toe, lingering on my body, burning me with a gaze so hot it could have melted duranium. Her small hand, encased in the black leather gloves she favored, rested on my chest. I could feel its slight heat through my tattered Maquis shirt.
"You don't know what sort of man I want," she said.
Her hand ran down my body, and cupped my balls. She squeezed briefly, hard enough to touch the edge of pain. "At least, you don't know yet."
She removed her hand, and I knew how a slave must feel when the branding iron lifted.
I resisted her. Janeway used her sexuality like a whip, handing out enough promise, enough pain, to rule by the scent of desire. That alone was enough to keep most of the crew in line-males and females. One by one they fell for her: Paris, Kim, even my ex-lover, B'Elanna. Tuvok, of course, had been her black cohort since they first met, four years before. Enough of the crew was under her command to ensure the silence and cooperation of those who resisted.
For my part, I kept to myself, doing my duties as first officer, forcing my own brand of respect, enough that Janeway's henchmen left me alone. I thought I'd earned that respect on my own merit, until I pushed Paris that bit too far. His insolent gaze slid away from mine and he turned back to the helm and made a sluggish course correction that was deliberately a few degrees off.
"She's ordered us away from you," he said to the viewscreen. "Wants the pleasure of breaking you herself." He turned to face me, and his smile ran up his face but stopped before reaching his eyes. "Lucky you."
I trod a fine line. I gave her enough respect, followed enough of her orders that she left me alone the times I refused to play along. Once, when she lazily gave the order to fire on a small Talaxian convoy, purely to give the junior officers target practice, I objected.
"Captain, they have harmed no one. They are taking medical supplies to Rekus Prime, and-"
Her eyes hardened to flint, and her fingers, in those soft black gloves, clenched on the center armrest. "Are you questioning my orders, Chakotay?"
I measured her controlled wrath in my thundering heartbeat.
When the silence had stretched to the point of insubordination, she leaned toward me. "Remember Kes, Chakotay. Consider the perils of resistance."
I remembered Kes. Remembered covering my ears against her screams as she died. Died, cowering from the blows of Kim and his hypospanner. Died, protesting in vain against the selling of prisoners to slave traders. Prisoners that Janeway had taken to provide grunt labor for Voyager's repairs, and then had callously disposed of when they were superfluous.
With the metallic taste of defeat in my mouth, and sorrow in my heart, I watched as she gave the order, and choked on my own cowardice as the debris of the Talaxian convoy make the stars appear dim.
In spite of that, in spite of it all, I wanted her. And she wanted me too; I could see it in the way she watched me. When we gained our Borg fighting force, she bade me accompany her to the cargo bay to gloat.
We stood, shoulder to shoulder, watching them regenerate. She turned to me, and her dark red hair gleamed like the wing of a bird of prey.
"They will ensure Voyager's supremacy, Chakotay," she said.
In the dim light, I could see only the curve of her hair and the pale skin of her face as it turned up to me. Her gloved hands rested on my chest. It was a parody of a lover's pose, and I was about to put some distance between us, when there was the touch of leather on my neck. Her hand curved, pulled me down, and then her lips were on mine, hot, insistent, and demanding.
I tried to resist. Somewhere, in the back of my mind--in a small, feeble, part--I knew this was only another of her strategies. A way of ensuring my compliance. But my thundering pulse, the slight weight of her body against me, and her lips on mine, seeking and finding, had me hard and aching in seconds. And then she retreated just as quickly, and the space between us seemed too wide to cross. I could see her nipples erect underneath the black tank she wore.
"We could be very good together." And then she was gone, and I was left alone in the dim cargo bay, with only the Borg of my nightmares and the weight of my desire as company.
Voyager was sixty thousand light years from Earth when we met the Vaskans. To Janeway, the bargain was sweet: ensure a Vaskan victory over the Kyrians. And in return, she would gain the most coveted prize of all: a way home for Voyager via a cyclic wormhole. By now, her reputation had spread through this sector of the Delta Quadrant. The Warship Voyager: famous, fierce, and unrelenting. Armed with photon torpedoes, enough weaponry to reduce a small planet to space dust, and an android doctor, skilled in creating biogenic weapons. Janeway bargained for what she needed and took it anyway if the deal wasn't sweet enough. She was cruel, hard, as fine-honed as a blade of titanium.
And, to my shame, I still wanted her.
I'd lie awake at night and think of her narrow-hipped body underneath mine, those white hands on me, as cold and unfeeling as marble. My flesh in hers, buried in her core, spilling myself into her heat.
But when I heard exactly how she planned to ensure the Vaskan victory, I was repulsed. That she could even consider such a course of action was repellant to everything I still clung to. My status as a man of peace had been compromised during the last few years, but some things were still beyond my shifting limits.
She knew this; I could see the amusement in her face. I wanted to wipe that from her. I knew I could never change her, but still I wanted to drive out her black heart and replace it with lust, for me and all that I am. I wanted to look down at her as she lay underneath me, my cock buried inside her, and I wanted to see her lose herself in her orgasm. I wanted to give her that, as if by doing so I could make her into something new, something better.
Spirits, how I wanted that. And what a vain and foolish hope that was.
I knew she'd finalized a deal with the Vaskan ambassador to ensure their victory. I knew it involved the Doctor's new biogenic weapons, and I knew enough of the bare bones of the plan to hope that I never learned more. Every new atrocity, every spaceship destroyed, every prisoner tortured, was one more nail in the boards around me. They shored me up, so that I knew if it continued, I would become as hard and unbending as Janeway herself.
I craved that, even as I shunned the idea. I could become like her, and tidy away the guilt, rationalize it. I was only following orders.The weary cry of soldiers over the centuries who have taken the easy way out. I thought I had myself under control, with my selective sight and selective knowledge.
And then Janeway came to my quarters in the middle of the night.
It wasn't the first time. She'd come several times, over the years, to taunt, torment, or tease me. She'd flirted in her calculated way, but always, she had come with an ulterior motive.
She was as close to off duty as she ever got. Her dark copper hair clung to her head, and she'd discarded her jacket. The black turtleneck outlined her shape, highlighting her small breasts, the strength in her arms. There was a restrained intensity to her smile that instantly set the hairs on the back of my neck upright.
She had used her override to enter, and I simply stared as she threw herself down on the couch, and lifted a languid hand.
"Aren't you going to offer me something to drink?"
"Of course. Your usual Romulan ale?"
"Not tonight." That smile again, dark and feral. "Champagne."
"What are we celebrating?"
"Give me a drink, and I'll tell you."
I called for two glasses from the replicator, wincing as I mentally reviewed how few replicator rations I had left.
Janeway tasted, then drained the glass in one swallow. The glass crashed against the wall, crystal shards shining in the overhead lights.
"Don't you trust me.... lover?"
I started, how could I not with such a statement. And oh, how I regretted my involuntary reaction when I saw her feral grin.
"An occasion such as this deserves a bottle of Chateau Picard, nothing less. Oh, don't whine about rations, I'll top up your account in the morning."
I turned my back to her as I stood at the replicator, and the hope and fear I'd worked so hard to suppress came bubbling to the surface. Lover. This must be big. Lover. She wants me. Lover. Spirits! What will it do to my soul to give her what she wants in return?
I replicated a bottle and joined her on the couch. Her bare toes brushed my trousered thigh.
"To us." She clinked glasses and I could see her alert, sly eye watching me over the rim.
I waited for the axe to fall.
"And to the annihilation of the Kyrian race."
Liquid splashed onto my pants as the glass shook in my hand. Spirits, it was worse than I could ever have imagined. Years of dealing with her had taught me to hold my peace. There was more to come, I could feel the horror of it leeching into my bones like a morning frost. The champagne burned in my gullet.
She cocked an eyebrow. "Nothing to say? No little speech about how peaceful and unthreatening they are? How it's not worth the price to gain a shortcut home?"
I shook my head. Nothing I could say would change her mind.
"Good. Finally, you're learning." Her hand rested on my thigh, and in spite of the visceral horror at her words, the touch, so close to my twitching cock, had a predictable effect.
"Do you want to hear my plan?" She continued without waiting for my answer. "The Doctor has developed a biogenic weapon, unparalleled in its effectiveness and rate of spread. He guarantees that there will be 50,000 dead in the first five minutes, 500,000 within a few hours. How fortunate that we came across the Nascans--an oppressed race of underdogs at a time we wanted to test it. His weapon will help restore the balance of power in this quadrant. Such a lofty goal, don't you think?"
My glass stood untouched. I could no more have taken a sip than I could have slit my own throat.
Janeway fell silent, yet her hand remained on my thigh. Slight though its weight was, it burned.
And then, "I've decided to take a lover."
The hand on my leg, the leap in my heart told me whom she had chosen. And yet, there was still her price. I took the easy way out. Moving swiftly, I pressed her back against the couch, grasped her hair--oh, how soft and fluid in my fingers--and covered her mouth with my own. Wet, hot and demanding. Desperate. Forcing her lips apart, I sought entry with my tongue, and for glorious moments, we dueled fiercely. Then she stopped me with a hand on my chest.
"Not so fast, lover. There's a test of your willingness first."
And, in that moment I saw the door of eternal damnation and slavery slam shut, trapping me in her lair.
© Shayenne, October 2005 Please email me to post/distribute elsewhere.