The BLTS Archive - Passions of The Soul
First in the Nemesis series
by Suzanne Finn (yatokahc@aol.com)

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Disclaimer : You know the drill... Paramount owns everything except my
mind and what little there is up there that escapes out my fingers!

Note-Text falling between asterisks (*) indicate thoughts.

Feel free to pass this along to anyone else you think may enjoy it... but
please keep all the preamble attached!

This is an epilogue. Remember... unless otherwise specified, he/him and
she/her refer to Chakotay and Kathryn, respectively.

Note - I stole the title from Descartes. Seemed fitting... the title, not
the thievery. I also stole a of couple sentences from my Unity epilogue,
"Divided We Stand", regarding darkness and light. I guess I liked the way I
expressed my thoughts at the time, so I decided to reuse it!  :: Suz
walking away humbly ::

This is for Victoria. You wait so patiently. <BG>.

---

He again found himself engulfed in darkness, pacing out his agitation on
the carpet beneath his feet. Darkness. A familiar harbor. A welcome cloak.
He'd retreated from sickbay to the sanctuary of his quarters, hate goading
his heart, contempt nipping at his heels. By the time he'd reached his
cabin, the burden of what had happened had become almost intolerable.

He was weary. As weary as if the experiences of the past three days had
actually happened. They hadn't. Illusions of reality. The path of
deception. He'd walked it's length once again... unknowingly, but walked it
nevertheless. He'd been deposited on the path, pushed and pulled through
the lies littering it, and ultimately hurled down its length of his own
volition, fueled by a passion long suppressed.

He'd almost called for lights, but decided against it. Light would somehow
force the harshness of reality to intrude upon him. *Reality.* He snorted.
What, in truth, was reality? A subjective interpretation of experience and
environment? Fact, distorted and filtered? What of his experience with the
Vori? Delusion. He had been deluded. Deceived. Unduly influenced. The
aftereffects of the delusions were very real. His mind still struggled with
the seeming reality of the lie. His body still ached with the physical
reminders of battle. His soul...

He stilled his feet, breathed deeply, a meager attempt to control the
labor of his heart. The Kradin. The Vori. A war not his own. And yet, it
had become his. A vicarious phantom. Hate, anger, betrayal sucked at him as
if he were sinking into his own nightmarish past. The intensity, the
passion, overwhelmed him. Despite the passage of time, despite the distance
between Voyager and the Alpha Quadrant, he was not permitted to forget...
himself, faded passions, buried memories. His past had suddenly reasserted
its hold on him.

Illusions of reality. Echoes of the past. Intertwined. The Kradin/Vori
conflict had been reduced to a known situation, a conflict of his own... a
memory recalled, unwelcome and unbidden. The parallels, the similarities,
to his personal experiences were astonishing. Or was that by design? What
tactics did the Vori employ to engage the sympathies of the aliens they
abducted... inducted? Either they were masters of inference and deception,
or he was an exceptional fool. Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps it was both.
Regardless... the angry warrior had risen again.

Peace, ever elusive in his former life, recently attained, eluded him
again. It had slipped from his grasp. The illusory war into which he had
been drawn left him engaged in his own private war. Peace and war. They
could not coexist within the boundless confines of his soul.

With a sharp twist of nausea, he found he was pounding a fist into the
wall that had mysteriously appeared before him. He froze. Silently, he drew
his right hand up, tried to see if he had injured himself, but the dim
starlight filtering into the room showed him nothing. He exhaled heavily,
ignoring the throbbing in his hand. He walked clumsily to the doorway of
his bedroom, reached out to support his weight against the frame.

For the hundredth time, his mind sifted through the events of the last few
days. So much had happened, so quickly. There was no way he could have
known it was anything but real. It had felt real, as did the residual
turmoil. He hated the Kradin, almost as much as he hated the Cardassians.
The same, yet different. He did not share a history with the Vori. He knew
not the origins of their war. But, he understood their illusory life, their
hatred, their anger. He understood the casualties of war, the brutality,
the reality. He understood the loss of innocence, the loss of life. He
understood... sympathized... empathized.

The Kradin claimed the same loss, the same reality, the same
brutalization. Yet, he felt no empathy, no sympathy. Only hatred. Illusions
of reality had ignited that hatred. Echoes of the past served as kindling.

In actuality, he knew nothing of the Kradin beyond what was fed to him by
the Vori, a projection of a Vori perception. Propaganda. He could not fault
the Vori. The Maquis... he... had been guilty of nothing less. The
machinations of war. And yet, he found himself wondering at the truth
behind the illusion. He found himself wondering at the lie of the illusion
itself.

What tales had the Kradin to tell? What atrocities had they been victim
of? Were they in actuality beasts? Or did their appearance belie their
spirit? Were they the aggressor? The victim? Neither? Both?

Had someone posed the same questions regarding the Cardassians, he would
have cursed their soul to eternal damnation. He would have berated them for
daring to compare the atrocities committed by the Maquis with those
committed by the Cardassians. He would have laughed at the idea of a
Cardassian possessing a soul. And yet, ignoring the impetus of the
conflict, would anyone discern the difference between the Maquis and the
Cardassians? Ignoring heart and soul, ignoring reason and motivation...
were the actions of one any different than the actions of the other? His
heart screamed yes. In his mind, he wasn't sure.

Some might argue that war was a necessary evil, that the end justified the
means. But, there was nothing noble in the act of war. War bred
desperation. War bred hatred. War permitted brutality and desecration...
encouraged them. War bred lies and sustained the illusion.

He swallowed hard. In order to become a warrior, he had become all that
war embodied. Reason and motivation were justification... for entering into
battle, for acts committed, for remaining. They were necessary... for his
induction. But in the act of war, there was no room for rationalization.
During his term in the Maquis, he had not squandered time analyzing his
actions. He had felt, not thought. Passion had driven him. Passion is what
the Vori ignited. He knew not the reason and motivation of the Vori or the
Kradin. He had no knowledge of their conflict... how it began, what
preceded it. He'd provided the reason and motivation himself, a projection
of his own past, based on the illusory realities of an alien war.

Hate, anger, betrayal. Passions too easily rediscovered.

He moved to his bed... quietly lowered himself, perched himself on the
edge of the mattress. He stared blankly into the darkness. He was weary...
throughout every fiber of his being. He stretched himself out flat against
the cool sheets of his bed and held himself still for a long time, his mind
numb, his heart aching. He was asleep before the conflict assaulted him again.

---

He bolted upright, dragged into awareness by the chirping of the door
chime. He swallowed hard, ran a hand over his face. "Come." His voice
grated, thick from sleep. He pushed himself shakily to his feet, moved to
the doorway leading to the outer room of his quarters. She was there,
standing in the darkness.

She tilted her head, studied his appearance... rumpled clothing, tousled
hair, laden eyes. She'd wakened him. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake
you... I'll go." She turned to leave. As she reached the door to the
corridor, a hand touched her sleeve, stopped her.

He didn't want her to leave. Her presence was a balm. She was his light.
She was his hope... *For peace.* When she hesitated, he recalled his hand.
"Why did you come?" His voice was husky from sleep... more.

She turned her face to his, her body following more slowly. "I came to see
how you were doing." She moistened her lips. "You seemed... unsettled...
earlier."

He snorted quietly, turned away, stepped into the dark haven of the room.
*If you only knew.*

He was struggling. But with what? Why was the conflict between the Kradin
and the Vori so difficult to cast off? Had three days of mind control
implanted the suffering, the passion, of the Vori so deeply within him that
he could no longer separate it from himself? He had no connection to these
people... except for the lies forced upon him.

"I thought you might want to talk about what happened planetside... 
about... what is troubling you."

His back remained facing her... stiff, unresponsive.

Faced with his silence, she crossed the short distance between them to
stand before him against the background of the starscape. His eyes were
lifted to the viewport, his expression unreadable. He wore the mask well.
She didn't want to make demands on him. But, she couldn't help him if she
didn't know what was wrong. She exhaled heavily. "I'm here as your friend,
Chakotay, not as your Captain."

Brown briefly met blue, then returned to the starscape. He sighed, then
met her eyes again. "I'm not sure you would understand."

She sighed inwardly. A beginning. An opening. "Does it matter?"

He lowered his head, stared distractedly at her right boot. Did it matter
whether or not she understood the darkness gripping his heart? Did it
matter whether or not she understood the world from which her enemy had
been torn when mercilessly dragged into the Delta Quadrant? Did it matter
whether or not she understood what it meant to be at war? Did it matter
whether of not she understood how war changed a man? She'd engaged in
battle, but had never lived war, not the way his people did. She had never
lived the existence of the Maquis. "It might." He wasn't sure.

Her gaze followed his, then raised again to find him looking at her. She
smiled faintly. "I can only try. That's the best I have to offer."

He smiled faintly, nodded once. A gift extended. He was grateful for it.
He found himself facing another exercise in trust, an opportunity to draw
her further into his confidence and reconstruct what had been destroyed
between them. He again offered himself... the dark side. "I must have
placed you in a rather difficult position this afternoon... with the Kradin
ambassador."

Her eyebrows raised imperceptibly, unsure of the reason behind mentioning
the incident. *Allow him to lead you.* "It was a bit awkward, but the
ambassador understood. The residual effects of Vori mind control are not
new to the Kradin." Her brow creased slightly, her eyes narrowed. "Though,
I must admit, I was surprised."

"Why?" It was more a demand than a question.

"That type of display is... uncharacteristic." He was a passionate man.
However, he kept the passions of his soul tightly reigned. Rarely were
those passions as visible as when he had been confronted with the Kradin
ambassador.

*Uncharacteristic.* Perhaps, for the man she knew. But, not for the man he
once was, the man that had recently emerged. "That type of display. You
mean enmity? Loathing?"

She'd been witness to the rare and unforgettable appearances of the
passions within him. Her mind drifted to another confrontation, a heated
debate regarding their alliance with the Borg. Her mind drifted even
further back, to an ancient legend about an angry warrior. Further still,
to the champion of a half-Klingon Maquis, the best Chief Engineer Voyager
would ever see. Anger, love, loyalty, friendship. "I've never really known
you to be capable of hatred."

His eyes lowered to her pips. "You'd be surprised what I'm capable of,
Kathryn."

Without doubt. The wellspring of his soul ran deep. One source fed
darkness and light. Darkness and light... both non-existent in the absence
of one... together creating texture, depth. Darkness and light... guilt and
grace... iniquity and innocence... vice and virtue. Coexistent. She could
not have one without the other. "Perhaps 'capable' wasn't the right word."
She turned her head slightly, her eyes remaining locked with his... willing
them to meet hers. Brown returned to blue. "I've never known you to empower
hatred. And given the circumstances..." She shifted slightly. "I have
difficulty understanding the lingering emotion, when you are fully aware
that everything that happened to you was... an illusion... a tactic of mind
control, of brainwashing. The Kradin have done you no wrong. Quite the
opposite." She moved closer, held his gaze. "It was the Vori who used you.
They played against your nature... your character... your compassion."

"Compassion had very little to do with what happened down there."
Compassion and war. Oil and water.

Mild confusion creased her brow. "You take seriously the reality of other
persons, their thoughts, their emotions, their external circumstances. I
call that compassion."

He snorted scornfully. "Reality. What was the reality of it, Kathryn? It
was delusion. It was deception."

"It was a psychological tactic. They played against your heart. They
appealed to your history, your spirit... even your sense of
responsibility." Realization struck. *Your history.* Her gaze drifted away,
over his shoulder. Her eyes grew blank. They'd used his past against him...
used it to suck him in, strangle his thought, inflame his heart, transform
him back into the warrior. Her brow creased slightly as her eyes returned
to his. She recognized the struggle behind the darkness of his eyes. A
struggle with demons long since buried. An old wound reopened. A war
relived... a war in which she had been the enemy. Her voice lowered
imperceptibly. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

She shook her head slightly, shrugged. "It never occurred to me that your
experience with the Vori had... reanimated the past."

He pushed his tongue into his cheek, bit it slightly. He quietly made his
way to the viewport, stood facing the stars, eyes unseeing. "War is war,
Kathryn. On the surface, every war is virtually the same. Brutality.
Devastation. Death."

"But the Vori presented something more. They forced you to care. They put
a face, a name, a heart, a voice on their cause. They imposed a reminder of
a personal pain... personal devastation and loss. They reminded you of your
own past. They reminded you why you had taken up arms, why you cleaved to
hatred." Slowly she turned in his direction. He was standing with his back
to her, silhouetted against the viewport.

"Passions easily rediscovered."

She looked at him for a long time, noting the tension in his shoulders,
his rigid stance, his clenched fists. A gentle man... lost, angry, hurting.
A deeply personal pain. She didn't know how to help him, how to bring him
comfort. She could only be.

"Why is it that darkness is so easily found, yet so difficult to shake?
Why is it that lightness is so easily lost, yet so difficult to regain?"
His voice was barely above a whisper.

She closed the distance between them, rested a hand on his arm.

Had they still been in the Alpha Quadrant, she would not be his friend...
she would be his enemy. Had they still been in the Alpha Quadrant, he would
have never known peace. What did that say of war? What did that say of
hatred? What did that say of love? He turned to her and looked into the
face of hope.

---

The End