Fic archive: Star Trek Voyager - "Softly" 1/1
This was, a decade or so ago, my first-ever fanfic. And it shows.

Series: VOY
Rating: PG-13
Codes: J/P
Summary: A morale exercise from Chakotay yields some unexpected answers

Contains a certain amount of swearing, and mush, but no sex (sorry).

disclaimer: The characters, the setting, and the what-all belong to Paramount/Viacom. The story belongs to me. Neither of us is making any money off this. Sucks, doesn't it?


The music described is from "The Piano" soundtrack.

To the Yarning Piper for reading, encouraging, and otherwise giving me the guts I needed to post something, thanks so much. Luv, Jane.


Softly
by Jane St. Clair



Message posted to the U.S.S. Voyager e-news.
Authorization: Chakotay 9-2-3-5-8-delta
Distribution: all
Subject: happy?

In my role as acting ship's counsellor, Neelix has brought it to my attention that crew morale is extremely low. It's been a long trip, I know. And it's hard, sometimes. So I'm setting a new assignment for the ship's crew.

I want everyone to recall the most perfect day they ever spent. Try to remember it in detail, down to the smells and the clothes you wore. Then write it down and send it to me (if I thought people would do it anyway, I wouldn't insist on the sending part, but I suspect that certain . . . individuals require supervision to get the job done). Everything sent to me is confidential as relates to my function as ship's counsellor. If the material is not overly personal, I may ask some people's permission to post their days on the BBS, but they will, as always, have the right to refuse. The final archive will fall under the care and confidentiality of the Doctor.

Note the subject of these messages as "re: happy?" for easy identification. Remember, this is supposed to be fun. No hurry, but think about it.
C.

*****
Authorization: Paris 22-8-7-3-9-epsilon
Distribution: Cmdr. Chakotay
Subject: re: happy?

Chakotay -

I could do without the cheap shots. Next time you think I'm not going to do something, take it up with me.

And, well, since you asked . . .


The most incredible day I ever spent I was fifteen in San Francisco, on Earth. My father'd been made an admiral a couple of months before, but the change hadn't really hit me yet. He still wasn't home very much. Just now he was at Fleet headquarters instead of in space. So I woke up alone in the house.

I loved that house, you know? At least I did when I was alone in it. Lots of windows, and I kind of liked the light. I'm a sunshine kind of person, guess it gets me kind of depressed, being out here and even when we're close to a star it doesn't feel quite the same because we're not in atmosphere, maybe. At least there was sun in New Zealand, brilliant colour of it coming through the leaves. Damn, I'm rambling aren't I? Well, it's my day and I'll tell it the way I want to.

Anyway, I woke up with sun pouring in through my bedroom windows. And when I looked out them, I could see most of the city spreading out to the ocean. We were up high, and there was no fog at all. Outside, it looked sort of . . . wild. Not like something was happening, but like something *might* happen, and the outside was sort of waiting to see what it was.

Can't honestly remember how I spent most of the day. Wore jeans and a white t-shirt and sandals, since you asked. Loved those jeans. They were so old they were palest of pale blues, like the colour of the sky just around the sun, ragged around the cuffs, rip in one knee and a hole on the back of the thigh, high enough up that it bordered on indecent. Sometimes I think I loved them because my father didn't know I had them and he'd have a fit if he did. Caught a streetcar downtown and spent most of the morning in the market. I used to get up really early, you know. I think young people have more energy (yeah, I know, I'm just SO old).

San Fran market smells like fish, most days, and sandalwood and something really sharp and green. Lots of stuff is sold outside, especially on warm days like that, and there's buskers (street musicians) around most of the time. So I hung out and met some people I knew and we just kind of stayed like that for a while, sitting outside and listening and watching people. Must've been lunchtime before we noticed. 'Cause there wasn't much air traffic, and what there was was mostly official looking and in a hurry. How often do you see an empty sky over the spaceport city at the centre of the Federation? Try never. Except then.

And then people were all looking at the sky, and it wasn't as bright as it had been, but it was *hot*. There were massive layers of clouds coming in, even though we weren't getting any wind on the ground. And the atmosphere in the market was kind of tense, too, and people were drifting away, so I went home.

At home I caught the newsvids. I guess the weather-control satellites had gone down a couple of days before. And it wouldn't normally have been a problem, but the weather systems they'd been setting up at the time had kind of merged, and I guess they figured we were in for kind of a wild show. Got the official announcements that meant "batten down the hatches, boys, this one is gonna be big." They didn't even quite know where, or exactly when. So all air traffic stopped.

Star Fleet went ballistic.

After the tenth or so call I just posted a message saying my father was at SFHQ and stopped answering the phone. But it was still this gorgeous, wild day, and the sky was *huge*. Sounds stupid, but I don't think I've ever seen it bigger. Our house was way up in the hills, and if I laid on my back on the deck all I could see if I sorta squinted was the sky, which was all grey and sort of dangerous looking.

I knew I had homework (I *always* had homework - never got much done in groups - not much changes, does it? I work better on my own, but that's not what we're talking about here, is it? Right, on with the tale . . . ) but I didn't want to be doing it. So I sort of wandered around the house until I came into the living room. It had this massive glass wall with doors in it, that was where you could see the ocean from, and the piano against the solid wall opposite it. Didn't want to stop looking out, but I wanted to play.

Gods, this is stupid. Here I am harping about the view. But the view is most of what I remember about the day. All the grey sky getting darker and the ocean that was moving so I could see it even from the hills. And the trees around the house were making noise because there was wind by this time, sort of a rustling, whispering sound, but getting pretty loud.

I started playing the piano. Playing a piece I'd memorized a couple of years before, late 20th century piano music. It was this really simple, repeating melody with a complex harmony line, and there are a bunch of variations on it in speed and pattern, so you could play it for a long time, and the music felt like that day, wild and grey and powerful and something that you don't have any words for just . . . . Yeah.

It got dark while I was playing there. Shouldn't have, so early, but the storm was coming in, and the clouds were almost black, and I could barely see the keys but by then I'd been playing for so long that some of the time I had my eyes closed and the rest it was just my hands. Playing like that is like flying, you just have to *know* because the processes have nothing to do with the music.

It fucking nearly scared me out of my skin. There was someone else in the house. I must have jumped about three feet. And then they turned the lights on and it was this girl in a Starfleet uniform.

She was beautiful.

(Don't make fun of me, Chakotay. I know you think I think any woman I have the slightest chance of getting into bed is beautiful, but I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I was a kid. And I just sat there on the edge of the piano bench and stared at her, must've looked like a fucking idiot with my mouth hanging open . . . but it doesn't really matter.)

You want details? She had brown hair that was pulled back in a kind of ponytail, but with bangs to make it soft around her face, and grey-blue eyes that looked ghostly above the teal of her uniform sciences, blue and black. And I said she was a girl but she wasn't, not really, she was maybe ten years or a little more older than me. The glass doors were open she'd come in that way and the room smelled like salt and tense air and something that I found out later was her perfume, peach-smell. And she was saying she was sorry she scared me, there hadn't been any answer when they'd tried to call from SFHQ to see if I was alright, and I hadn't answered the doorbell (I hadn't heard the doorbell), so she'd come around and let herself in. The way she said it wasn't frantic, it was just like she was explaining herself, I guess because she thought I was pissed because I was staring at her so hard.

I finally got it straight that she was my father's aide, the one he'd had while he was still a captain, and she was down with him in San Francisco until he got his new staff sorted out. They knew the storm was going to be bad. My dad (she said "dad" and I know she was lying, because it sounded like she was trying to assure me and it would never, ever have occurred to my father) didn't want me to be by myself, even though he had to stay down there all night.

What I did after that I don't remember exactly, except that she stayed and I turned on some lights because there weren't any on anywhere in the house. And since I was being supervised, I went off to do my homework.

I was never good at physics beyond the parts I needed to know to be able to fly. I had this massive assignment to get through and I didn't get a lot of it, so eventually I got angry. It was one of those things I knew I was going to get shit for later, because physics was really important on the academy entrance exams, but I couldn't concentrate enough to wrap my mind around the problem. Like I said, I got angry. And I threw the padd into the wall.

She was standing in the doorway. She saw it. But she didn't say anything, she just picked up the padd and checked to see if it still worked, and then she carried it over to me and sat down and then she explained it so I could understand. I wasn't even thinking then about her sitting close to me or about the way she smelled. And finally she just looked at me and said, "Come on, let's go get dinner."

We ate in the living room. The clouds were almost black, but they reflected all the city lights so you could see every ridge in them. I'd never seen clouds like that. The weather on earth is always really closely controlled, so there's never anything violent or dangerous, because I guess that three and four and five hundred years ago the weather used to kill people. The clouds were called thunderheads, she said. She'd seen them on another planet, once. But they weren't actually doing anything, just roiling around. After a while she was really quiet and then she asked me to play the piano again.

I was going to play the same piece, but it sounded too big with another person in the house, so I played another piece from the same collection, one that was quieter and simpler and sounded really sad. "Piano," you know, it means "softly." The way it's supposed to be. And after that, because that piece had an ending, even if the first one didn't, I tried one of the variations. It started out sounding wounded, like the music was hurt and slow and some of the notes were missing. Then it got loud really suddenly and became the first song again and at the end (when I played it alone, I usually got the house computer to add the orchestra that's behind the piano in the last section) there was thunder.

I had never, ever heard thunder before. It was low and sort of ran through my body and I went pounding out onto the deck to see what it was. Stupid, but I was a kid and it was something totally alien to me. So I saw the lightning coming in off the sea, and I felt it when the rain started. There still wasn't much wind, but the rain was so thick I thought I was going to drown. Got absolutely soaked.

Then she brought me back into the house. I was so embarrassed when I looked at her, but she just smiled that little, tight smile, the one that says, yeah, it's that way, so I went off and got changed into sweats and another t-shirt and came back towelling my hair. She was sitting on the sofa facing the windows, looking out at the storm. The wind had started; it was screaming loud and the rain came in waves and broke against the glass. Every time there was lightning it lit up her face and showed all the edges of it. Then it was incredibly loud and we lost lights. She said that was close, and when the lights didn't come back right away I understood the power grid was down. Which had never, ever happened.

Dark in there. I ended up sitting on the couch with her, and she taught me how to count the one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi between lightning and thunder to figure out how far away it is. The measurements come out in miles -- old Earth measurement units that only die-hards were still using by the early 21st century, but primitive, like lightning. And it felt good.

Sat there with her for hours. At some point, she started rubbing my neck and I hadn't realized until then I was so tense. When she touched me, it was like all the shit and everything I'd ever fucked up and all the crap between me and my father didn't really matter and maybe I was a good person. Or maybe only that she was a good person. It was cold in the house without power so we ended up wrapped in afghans, still looking at the storm. And it seemed so natural when she came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me back against her. Nobody'd held me like that since my mother died, when I was eight.

We fell asleep like that, on the couch. I know I did first, but when I woke up she was asleep too. It was still storming, but not so loudly, and there were still no lights. The whole valley dark like there was no city there at all. She was behind me on the couch, pressed up against my body and both of us under both the afghans, one arm around my waist. I remember it took me forever to turn over but I wanted more than anything to face her. And when I was turned her arm was still around me. And I felt *safe*.

(I am going to tell you something now, Chakotay, because I know you are laughing at me. I *like* women. I don't mean as objects. I mean I like them as people, I like them as living things, I like them as some kind of magical thing in a complementary form to ours. I like to talk to them, and to be around them. They see things differently. I do not, contrary to popular belief, view them as sexual receptacles. I just behave that way sometimes. I never said I wasn't an asshole. I am. But I like women and I think sometimes they deserve better than me. Not the point.)

That was the first woman I ever wanted to make love to. Not to screw, or to fuck (yes, there's a distinction, and someday I'll explain it to you), but to touch and worship and give her every part of myself that was worth anything and make her happy and make us one person for just a second. But who was I kidding? So I just laid there and traced out all the lines and planes of her face with one of my fingers and appreciated the way her body was warm and the way it fit against mine. And I know my head was on her shoulder when I fell asleep again.



So. That's the story. I'm not sure, now that I look at it, that that is the most perfect day I can remember, but it's the one I needed to talk about. The details there are weird, like I know we talked more than I'm writing down, but I mostly can't remember what it was we said. I talk a lot, but it doesn't mean anything, mostly.

Oh, and if you happen to like loose ends tied up, she wasn't there when I woke up in the morning. I'd sort of changed position, so she could have gotten out without waking me, and I guess she did.

P.

*****
Authorization: Chakotay 9-2-3-5-8-delta
Distribution: Lt. Thomas Paris
Subject: cheap shots

Tom-
The ". . . individuals" were mostly B'Elanna and the Captain. B'Elanna would do anything to avoid an activity like this, and the Captain would put it at the bottom of her list of things-to-do, underneath the reviewing the sanitation of the jefferies tubes ;-). I didn't have you particularly in mind.
Tom, what was her name?
C.

*****
Authorization: Paris 22-8-7-3-9-epsilon
Distribution: Cmdr. Chakotay
Subject: re: cheap shots

With all due respect, Commander, don't push your luck.
P.

*****
Authorization: Janeway 0-0-47-5-1
Distribution: Cmdr. Chakotay
Subject: re: happy?

Chakotay -
Do you have the authority to order your captain to do this? I think we should take it up with Command :-).

I suppose I feel uncomfortable writing this. The day that came to mind wasn't among the ones that should have. Appropriate would be something with Mark and Molly Malone, on Earth or one of the colony worlds (we did take the dog on vacation from time to time, if the quarantine rules weren't too strict), high summer and sunshine and true love. But Mark fades for me a lot, too many nights and too many light years away. I know he takes care of Molly for me, and I hope he's happy. But sometimes I wonder if he loved me enough to have his life as devastated by my disappearance as I imagine it was. Maybe not. But, as I imagine Seven would tell me, melancholy is irrelevant. I believe you asked me for something about a day.

The day that came to mind isn't what I'd think of as a good day at all. Most of it was hellish. It was after the Al Batani, the transition period that I spent on earth while the captain (admiral?) got settled. I was never one for being earth-bound, even for a little while. Still, he asked me to come with him, and I could hardly say no, could I? So it was day after day at stuffy headquarters (they keep a separate atmosphere there, you know, to prevent contamination) sitting at a desk and reading reports and wishing I was back on a ship - *any* ship.

A *charming* morning, let me tell you. The weather control satellites for the *entire planet* had gone down, and suddenly we were stuck with a storm brewing. On Earth. It wasn't Fleet's responsibility to deal with the satellites (that's planetary), but we accounted for something like a third of the surface-to-orbit traffic out of the city on any given day, and orders had come in that we had to ground everybody *right now*.

So we've got duty officers screaming on one line and Admin on the other demanding how they were going to rework the transport schedules and at some point the admiral swept through and demanded to know wasn't there anything *I* could be doing to solve the problem.

He's lucky I didn't throttle him with his own admiral's bars.

And then, about mid-afternoon, one of the secretaries crept in and asked me didn't the admiral have a child or something? Home alone? I said I didn't know. I had to think about it. (You know, even when we were doing deep space work and we were out for months at a time, he never kept family pictures or mementoes on his desk. I served with the man for three years before I learned he wasn't just adrift in space and time.) The secretary'd been calling the house for hours, as I understood it, but there was just a repeating message, no answer.

I asked the admiral myself. The staff were refusing to enter his office (it was still like that the day I left Earth for the last time - I meant to call and say goodbye, but he was in a meeting and no one was willing to interrupt him - ever the dedicated officer, I suppose). I asked him about the child and what would he like to do, but he just dragged a hand across his eyes and said, 'Kathryn, you deal with it.'

I remember leaving headquarters and being struck by the change in the day. When I'd gone in that morning, the whole city had been sunny and bright. Now there were thunderheads pouring in off the sea and wind so strong I thought I might blow away. It was the kind of dark that you get before the sun goes down, black sky making black land. I took the public transports as far as I could, then walked the last kilometre and a half because the routes didn't go into the admiral's home ground. Even in the 24th century, we have elites, and in San Francisco they are those who do not take the public transports to work.

I'd never been to his house in all the years we'd worked together. It was a shock to see it like that, outlined against the sky with the city lights refracting off it. The building was two-storey, the lower part built into the hill and the upper section almost completely glass. Late 22nd century, the style that became popular immediately after they stabilized the San Andreas fault. I suppose it was just a kind of triumph, a declaration that yes, San Franciscans too could live in glass houses if they so chose.

Maybe I panicked when there was no response at the door. You didn't fail when the admiral sent you to do something, but I could just picture his face if I broke in and got arrested when the security alarms went off. ('Oh, but it was on your orders, Sir. Now if you could just come and bail me out, please.' Sure.) So I walked around the house, looking for another door, a way in, even a sign of life. All the windows were dark. On the side facing the ocean, there was a deck on the second level, and sliding doors, so I went to check those.

There's a level of light that allows you to see through a glass surface with no reflection at all, and I think it must have been just dark enough for me to see directly through. I had expected, I suppose, a child of six or seven, and probably a girl. Someone who would arouse a lot of concern being home alone. But that wasn't reasonable. The admiral's wife had been dead longer than that. What I was looking at was one of the polished, wealthy children you see in the city markets, perfectly moulded and glittering like sunlight, inactive and untouchable. Except that this one was alone, sitting on a piano bench. So still that if I hadn't caught the dip of a shoulder as the right hand came flying up the keyboard, I might have assumed he wasn't playing. I hadn't been expecting a boy, you see.

I don't remember opening the door, only standing in the room and the music hitting me. Music for wild weather like the planet hadn't see in over a century. This boy concentrating on his playing until he didn't realize I was there. Incredible shaggy blond hair and pale clothes that lost all their colour in the dim light, everything in shades of grey like a pencil sketch. He was . . . angelic.

And then he stopped playing and whirled to look at me and I don't know how long we spent staring at each other before I turned on the lights and broke the contact between us. I felt like such a fool. I was an unannounced stranger who'd just walked into this boy's home and stood staring at him while he played the piano. I suppose I babbled something out that resembled an explanation because he finally stopped looking like a deer caught in headlights. He left the room turning, turning on lights as he went.

I spent a long time after that staring at the storm blowing in. It's one thing to see violent weather on a half-tamed world. It's quite another to see at the heart of the Federation. Like for everything we've built and learned and explored, we don't really matter. A couple of days without our interference and ancient patterns start reasserting themselves.

It was damned near black out there before I even remembered that I was supposed to be . . . doing something. For want of a better word, babysitting. And went looking for him through the house.

I remember finding his bedroom door a split second before a padd came flying towards it. About then I really believed he had to be the admiral's son -- no one else (except maybe a certain half-Klingon engineer of our mutual acquaintance) would get angry enough to throw hardware against the wall. Then I got hit in the stomach with his look. Like everything he had depended on something that he couldn't do. Rage and frustration and fear. And every thought I had told me to *fix it*.

I remember sitting down beside him on his bed and falling into teaching mode. Explain *everything* until you isolate the problem. I don't remember what we were working on. I remember more how anonymous the room was - blank walls, standard furniture, solid colours - and I remember there were books beside the bed. Printed books, mostly 20th century. And what's bizarre is that I remember what most of them were (boy, you can tell how much *I* was paying attention to what I was doing at the time). "Catch-22," "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," "Coming Through Slaughter," "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Sitting there, half watching the room, half concentrating on the boy beside me, covering his hands with my own as if I were showing him a physical motion, as protective as I've ever felt in my life.

We finished the afternoon like that. The bedroom windows faced east, so I couldn't see the storm coming in until it was on top of us, and by then it was dark and I was wondering how much time had passed.

Part of my fix-it attitude went into indulgence mode, and I elected for something really messy for supper and we ate it on the furniture. (I only tell you this now because we're in the Delta Quadrant and you can't tell anyone. I've never seen a cleaner house in my entire life. The sort of place that you stand very still in the middle of a room because you're afraid to touch anything for fear you might get it dirty.)

The living room had the most incredible west-facing windows, Chakotay, the view like you can't imagine. We could still make out the clouds. I don't remember him getting up or going to the windows, only the awe in his face I saw reflected in the glass. Of course he would never have seen storm clouds before. He lived on earth, where such things don't happen. And it is a sight, even if you've seen it before, it never gets old. I remembered the sound of the piano when I'd come in, how perfectly it matched the day. How perfectly it matched his expression, standing there, watching. I needed so badly to hear him play.

I can't fully explain now the effect that sound had on me. It came out of his playing, the self-absorption and the simultaneous attention to the day and the room and to me sitting there listening to him. Soft sounds, touching me and making me warm and relaxed after a miserable day that had suddenly improved. Beautiful hands stroking ivory keys. And thunder.

The effect on him was electric. The music broke off so suddenly, the lingering waves of it in the air sounded damaged, and he was already gone. Gone out, into the rain. He stood there and he just looked so god-damned lost and for a second . . .

Chakotay, it was like I got just a flash of everything that was coming up for him, but it was gone so fast I couldn't grasp it. It just left me standing there with the knowledge that the teenager standing there getting soaked in the rain was headed for much more, or something much different, than a textbook Starfleet career. And I let him stand there for a long time before it occurred to me to call him in out of the rain.

I thought he must be angry at me for staring at him like that, but he never said a thing, just went past me back into the house and left me there.

I curled up on the couch and wondered where my mind was going. If he hadn't been so much younger than me, I would have thought I was falling in love with him. I had to be out of my mind, or experiencing dramatically displaced mothering urges. A need to fix it, to hold him. I think I would have given my soul for it.

And there was lightning. I'd been counting the distance, absently, the old-fashioned way that I'd once had someone show me of measuring the speed of sound. Maybe it was audible because when I turned back to the room from the windows, he was there, watching me, and he had the strangest expression on his face.

We lost power suddenly, and we got the one sight that few in the universe have been privileged to see: the city of San Francisco in complete and utter darkness. It made the lightning more immediate, the sounds louder. I don't know when he came to sit beside me on the couch. I'd started talking, quietly, to fill the silence between thunderpeals, and at some point we came into contact and stayed that way.

Just that night, I had a peace as strong as any I can remember. I could have stayed there forever, stroking that golden hair until he slept in my arms. For a long time after he dozed off I stayed like that, with my cheek against his hair, watching the storm. Thinking that if I was the admiral, I wouldn't have given this boy up, even for a starship, that I would have kept him with me any way I could.

And simply meditating on the storm. It was so utterly primitive, hour after hour of electricity from the upper atmosphere reaching down nearly to the planet's surface. We couldn't escape from that world then, not by transporter or by ship. And in the dark, dark in the house and dark all over San Francisco, it could have been that there weren't ten billion people on Earth, or even ten. Maybe no one at all. And I wasn't going to leave him, ever, if I could help it. So I arranged us as best I could on the couch, under a blanket of some kind against the cold in that room, so that I ended up pressed between his body and the sofa back. Smelling him, like sunshine and clean clothes and sea salt, and smelling the rain outside, and resting in the warmth of his body until I fell asleep.

Why can I remember even now what I was thinking, Chakotay?

I dreamed that night, the kind of dream that you never grasp fully, but that clings to the edge of your consciousness for years, sometimes immediate and sometimes frustratingly out of reach. What I can remember now is touch. It felt as though I were being drawn, defined out of wet air by fingers softly raining on my skin. I was never touched by that, not by a parent or a friend, not by any lover. No one has ever loved me as much as that touch. I dreamed it was penetrating my skin and touching the thing underneath that isn't rank or name, the only word that comes to mind for it is self. And love.

When I woke before morning, he'd changed position and we were sleeping face to face. Wound so tightly around one another that between the numbness of sleeping too long in one position and my eyes fuzzy with tiredness and the dim light, I couldn't identify specific limbs as mine. At that moment, I loved him more than Mark or anyone before him.

But I must have stirred when I woke because it disturbed him and he shifted away from me and broke the contact, rolling almost to the edge of the couch. And I knew I had to leave.

What I remember last is watching him sleep before I slipped out the door. He was so young, and I was still haunted by my dream and by the thing I'd almost seen the night before. There was the thin kind of light that comes at dawn when you face away from the sunrise, and there was my sunshine sleeping on the couch when I slipped out, softly.


Well, I'm sure that's not at all what you had in mind, and I certainly don't feel much better, but I needed to tell someone, and there's a comfort in remembering.

K.

P.S. There's a song my mother sang to me fairly often when I was very, very young. It's a song for a small voice, or a very quiet one. I remember it only vaguely at the moment, just the line "you'll never know, dear, how much I love you." As much that as anything, maybe.


*****
Authorization: Chakotay 9-2-3-5-8-delta
Distribution: Cpt. Kathryn Janeway
Subject: . . .

. . .

C.
*****