The BLTS Archive - Walking Different Paths
by Kate (k4writer02@yahoo.com)

---

DISCLAIMER: I disclaim. Paramount owns them -- I'm just
appropriating them for a short time.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: I offer my thanks to John and Briana for
beta-ing (all the way back in September) and for offering
insightful and constructive feedback. I appreciate it, and
I'm sure the readers will too. I'd also like to acknowledge
my debt to Charles Dickens, Robert Frost and William
Shakespeare. When you come up with a phrase, an idea or a
plot so good that it becomes a cultural staple, the tributes
even trickle down into an English major's recreation.

---

Chakotay yawned. It had been a hell of a day -- nothing had
gone as expected. He'd woken, unsettled at the date, as
always. During the night, his sleep had been disturbed, so
of course he overslept. He'd jumped in the sonic shower in a
rush, only to find that a converter had gone bad. While
alone that isolated event wasn't enough to ruin his day, it
had put him in a decidedly bad mood. He had gone to the
messhall for a quick meal, only to be cornered by the
resident Talaxian morale officer. Neelix had been overly
solicitous as usual, brainstorming ways to raise the "esprit
de corps" with food. Why Neelix had resorted to French
remained a mystery. Despite Chakotay's best efforts, the
Talaxian had eventually been offended by the commander's
refusal to try his latest dish -- a blend of leola root and
a sausage the cook had acquired on the last away mission.
Not even Chakotay's well-established vegetarian status saved
him from giving offense this time.

The doctor had accosted the first officer half way to the
bridge and begun to rant about an intruder -- someone was
"sneaking" into sickbay and rearranging supplies and the
doctor was not amused. It didn't do much harm when Naomi
Wildman had a hangnail, but what about the next time there
was an actual emergency, and the doctor couldn't find his
supplies? Chakotay saw his point, but even the first
officer's even temper was beginning to strain.

When he finally got to the bridge, Kathryn was obviously in
about the same state he was. She hadn't reprimanded his
tardiness publicly, but he'd gotten an earful in her ready
room before she went off duty. During the shift, no fewer
than three routine maintenance operations disrupted normal
ship operations and foot traffic by closing sections of busy
corridors.

He'd been relieved in his turn by Tuvok and went to the
holodeck to keep a standing appointment with B'Elanna.
Hoverball matches against the feisty engineer were one of
the highlights of his week. He needed the physical release
the exercise gave him and enjoyed being able to show his
competitive side to someone who wasn't shocked by it or
intimidated by his rank.

But when he got to the holodeck, she was there with Tom and
Ayala, suited up for Parises Squares. He'd agreed to be the
fourth person, but Tom injured himself in the first two
minutes, and needed B'Elanna to take him to sickbay. Ayala
had rolled expressive eyes at Chakotay -- Ayala didn't think
much of Tom Paris, though the pilot had proved himself loyal
to Voyager. Though they could've played hoverball, the men
had called off the game, because neither was really in the
mood.

By the time he returned to his own quarters, Chakotay was
ready to go to bed and give up on the day. But there was
Gerron, fresh from an argument with his suitemates, wanting
an answer to his problems. Chakotay had done a subpar (in
his own opinion) job of calming the former-Maquis.

By that time, the Commander's head was aching, but he
couldn't let the rest of the day pass without a vision quest
-- not this day, of all days. Though Chakotay felt almost
foolish for it, he had expected someone -- Dalby, Ayala,
Gerron... B'Elanna... to remember what this day was. But no
one had said anything.

Chakotay had dimmed his lights and performed a ritual
cleansing. To his later shame, he performed the ritual
hastily and absent-mindedly, at best. He donned simple
cotton garments and began his quest to the spirit world. But
despite his mediocre efforts with the akoonah, his spirit
guide did not approach. The clearing in the woods was silent
and still. The trees had been defoliated, and their
nakedness stabbed at him. The sun was obscured by haze. No
birds twittered, no insects hummed, no mammals or reptiles
crawled. The entire place was an inversion of his memories
of Dorvan. The only thing that moved was the wind. The air
whistled through the trees and their dead arms. The longer
he stared at the trees and their bare branches stabbing the
sky, the worse he felt.

He exited the vision quest sweating and nauseated. He
carefully repacked his medicine bundle. Spirit quests
sometimes revealed what you needed to see instead of what
you hoped to find -- but it was hard to reconcile. On the
anniversary of this day, the day Chakotay received his
tattoo and accepted the death of his tribe, he wanted to see
his mother and father quarrelling good-naturedly over the
coffee plants, wanted to see his sister dancing to music
that only she seemed to hear, wanted to hear the old men
talk of soil and weather and crops. He wanted to see that a
way of life that had been extinguished from one plane of
existence continued somewhere else. He didn't want to see
utter barrenness.

His sleep was troubled by dreams and restlessness, for the
second night in a row. In his first dream, his wolf guide
trotted to him. He turned from her, and she delivered a
slight nip, as she would to a cub that needed to be
corrected.

"You have much to learn, pup, though you are a man now."

He felt the words.

"Your vision tonight spoke not of your past, not of the
roots. Those are rich. They grow in good soil. The bare
branches and lack of animals speak of your future fears."

He looked at her.

"You fear that your tree will end, that you will drop no
apples, near or far."

Chakotay shrugged.

"I do not have a partner for my life. Children should never
be approached lightly. I thought, once, that I had a son.
But I did not, and it was for the best, since his mother was
who she was."

The wolf gave a little growl.

"Are you done brooding?"

"Brooding?"

"Pouting about what's done instead of thinking about what
actions you can take now to persuade her to be your
partner?"

Chakotay knew that lying to a spirit guide was like lying to
a part of the self, so he did not try to ask whom the
she-wolf meant.

"She has chosen another," he said simply.

The spirit guide twined around him, more like a feline than
a canine.

"By circumstance, because you were unavailable? Or because
her heart was fated to him?"

"I don't know," he said, and impatience shimmered through
his voice.

But that wasn't the only thing that shimmered -- somehow the
clearing in his dream was different. Chakotay turned and saw
the difference immediately.

"Q," he said, and the grim, disgusted acceptance in his
voice was more damning than a curse. "Even in dreaming we're
not free of you."

"My dear Chakotay, I'm hurt," the omnipotent being
announced. "I went to a great deal of trouble to be here."

"I thought you only tormented your favorites." Chakotay
hoped.

"Mmm, in waking," Q said. "But little Q is currently fascinated
with art from different cultures. We've hit a roadblock with
earth poetry, however. He simply refuses to understand "The Road
Not Taken" and all the works that spiral off from it. Are you
familiar with Frost's poetry, Commander? A twentieth century
American—received well during his lifetime, rejected later
as trite, then resurrected to enjoy a renaissance."

Chakotay nodded. He wondered if tapping on the back of his
hand would get him out of this nightmare.

"Well, I'll get to the point. Q are omnipotent."

"So you say," Chakotay observed.

"We know all dimensions, all parallel universes. So little Q
simply cannot conceive of a path that isn't taken. To him,
the Chakotay who is dreaming this on Voyager is identical to
the Chakotay in prison in Australia and that one is
identical to the desk-jockey in San Francisco and that one
is identical to the farmer who never left Dorvan V."

Chakotay began tapping the back of his hand. He sat up
abruptly, trying to clear his head. Q and a toddler stood at
the foot of his bed, grinning.

"Think of me as the ghost of opportunities missed."

Q grinned, grabbed Chakotay's wrist and the deck and cabin
warped around them.

---
What If They Hadn't Been Pulled into The Delta Quadrant?
---

Chakotay recognized his bridge before he even opened his
eyes to look at the sights around him. The sounds filled his
ears and gave him a sense of purpose and home that even
Voyager didn't always fulfill.

Chakotay and Q landed without sound. Little Q was hovering
behind them, like some demented Cupid. When Chakotay began
to yell, neither being reacted -- they melted from sight and
left the Commander alone, invisible and voiceless.

The former Maquis captain was intimately familiar with the
bridge of his old ship. He recognized the battered consoles,
the worn deck -- the patch for the console that had exploded
during a run-in with the Cardassians, the hatch to the
smuggling compartment where they hid a weapons locker.
B'Elanna had fashioned the patch out of chewing gum and
synth-metal—one of her many specialties.

Bendera had once compared B'Elanna's resourcefulness to that
of MacGyver, a holo character reinvented from some old Earth
legend. Bendera had made a bet with another Maquis
engineering crew that, given incentive, B'Elanna could
cobble together a ship out of spit, bailing wire, gum,
Federation discards and electrical tape. Chakotay's crew had
rallied behind Bendera unanimously -- a sign of faith that
Chakotay found somewhat worrisome. But Ayala had pointed out
to him that she had already basically done it. Their engine
was 40 years old, their shield generator even older. Bendera
had put the guns together using power cells and slag. By
some miracle, it worked well enough to keep them in the sky
-- most of the time.

But Chakotay didn't have long to muse on the familiar, but
lost, home.

There was Tuvok, at the tactical/OPS station. Chakotay
tasted betrayal for a moment, and it was both sour and
bitter. But then he let it pass, and rested his eyes on
B'Elanna and his younger self. He recognized the battle
before they said a word.

"Evek," he mumbled.

It had been one of life's cruel ironies that his crew had
survived a Cardassian Gul and the Badlands plasma storm only
to be swept 70,000 light years away.

He heard his own voice telling B'Elanna to be creative, and
her sharp retort. The deck rocked and bodies twisted, but
Voyager Chakotay's equilibrium was rock steady. Maquis
Chakotay sent his ship through desperate evasive maneuvers,
each one still coded in his counterpart's blood.

The shields were down to fifty percent and B'Elanna's
"creative solution" was to take power from the weapons.
Chakotay found himself marveling at the situation that
compelled him to agree to measures that desperate. Tuvok was
miserable at that prospect, but it got enough power to the
limping engines for them to get to the Badlands.

Chakotay navigated the plasma storm with experienced hands.
Voyager-Chakotay found himself standing behind the console
and mimicking the correct hand motions. B'Elanna was coaxing
the engines with her odd mix of brilliance and temper.

Behind them, the Cardassian ship exploded under the stress
of the storm. But this time, unlike Chakotay's memory,
B'Elanna demanded an emergency landing on an M-class moon,
for urgent repairs to the hull.

Captain Chakotay's eyes met and locked with B'Elanna's.

"If we land this thing, will we ever get it in the air
again?"

"If we don't land it, we won't live long enough to care."

She said in the refreshingly point-blank tone he had learned
to expect from her.

As her captain and, later, her commanding officer, Chakotay
had always appreciated that honesty.

"Would I ask for this if we didn't need it?"

B'Elanna's eyes sought his. What was she looking for?
Approval, reassurance, proof of his faith in her?

Whatever he found in their eye-lock was enough. The captain
took the ship down, almost ignoring Tuvok's advice to the
contrary.

Without the older Chakotay's consent, time jumped forward
and it was night. The crew had spread bedrolls out,
pretending for a time that they were camping, perhaps,
roughing it voluntarily. B'Elanna was closest to the fire --
they had nearly lost her to hypothermia once, on a
godforsaken iceball of a planet, and her captain had sworn
that he would never risk that again. Even then, she had
mattered so much.

Captain Chakotay sat next to her, roasting some kind of
prepackaged food. The Maquis looked for humor where it could
be found and Bendera had started some kind of betting pool
on whether rations could be improved by freezing, frying or
otherwise doctoring. The captain wasn't above such bets and
participating in it was also a way of trying to earn one of
B'Elanna's all too rare smiles. He had embarrassed her with
his praise, but she had grinned at him for his troubles.

And spending time with B'Elanna made sure that Seska kept
her distance. It was five years and change since Chakotay
had played that balancing game, but he remembered it well.

The older Chakotay felt like a fool. The B'Elanna of five
years ago was gazing at his counterpart with an emotion that
the Chakotay of today envied. How had he not seen it? He'd
thought she looked at him like a family member, but even in
the most united families, he doubted sisters looked at their
brothers with that sparkle.

Bendera and Ayala were directly across the fire from them.
B'Elanna was making some wisecrack or other to Bendera and
he was returning the favor affectionately when a murmuring
whisper ran through the crew like a ripple. There was no
more time to waste with observing interpersonal
relationships. Tuvok starting snapping out data like the
Starfleet officer he was. The phenomenon visible to them on
the ground was a coherent tachyon beam, and it was passing
through the space they would've been flying through. They
watched in silence as the moon's satellite vanished. It did
not explode, it did not rebound or alter course -- it
vanished. But for some reason (Captain Chakotay breathed a
prayer of thanks to the Sky Spirits for whatever it was),
the beam didn't penetrate the atmosphere of the moon. They
were safe.

The Maquis watched the green sweep of light disintegrate or
transport or destroy the moon's satellite in silence. He
almost felt their thoughts -- "We got lucky. One more time."
Here, people took different points of view. Some decided
they were blessed, touched by spirits. Others wondered how
many close calls they would survive.

Chakotay watched the younger, but more careworn self slip an
arm around Torres's shoulders.

"Good work, on the landing."

"Yeah, Torres, your drinks are on me next time we find a
decent cantina." Bendera promised.

The older Chakotay shook his head. Would it have been better
for his crew if they had stayed in the Alpha Quadrant? The
Maquis had been rounded up or slaughtered to the last man,
and while survivor's guilt still struck him, there was a
part of him the was glad that his crew was, for the most
part, alive. He'd been headed for a bad ending, with two
spies aboard and god knew how many sleeping psychological
time bombs. Torres's fuse was short, but visible. He was
less sure how much more Dalby and Gerron could've endured,
and Bendera's humor was a cover for a deep, simmering rage.

"Is that what you wanted me to start thinking, Q? That
things really didn't turn out so badly for me?"

Voyager's invisible Chakotay asked empty air.

The annoying sentient appeared with a pop.

"Not at all, Commander, not at all. I want you to see that
there are other possibilities. You're the most visionary of
the humans, though that isn't saying much. Open your mind a
bit."

Chakotay chose not to answer directly, but he turned to look
at the fire, at B'Elanna and Bendera and Ayala. They were
flushed with victory, with the joy of being alive one more
day.

"Besides, it's educational for little Q, to see that you
truly had no idea that you might never have left Starfleet,
or that you might not have arrived in time to meet B'Elanna
Torres. And every being on your ship has fantasized about
how different life would've been if you hadn't landed in the
Delta Quadrant, but let me tell you, things aren't looking
so great right now. That engine is more than twice as old as
your chief engineer and that nasty Gul managed to blow a few
holes in your ship."

"But they are okay?"

Chakotay's eyes focused on B'Elanna -- she was too thin. The
crew may be flushed and fevered with victory, but none of
them looked particularly well nourished.

"They make a noble end of it, but all in all, it doesn't
rouse that great bureaucracy of the Federation from apathy,
since you were, after all, credited with the demise of
Voyager and all aboard."

"We kill Kathryn? And the crew?"

"Well, actually they're swept to the Delta Quadrant, but
when they vanish, Starfleet blames you."

Q smirked.

"By that time, Tuvok's been discovered and eliminated, so he
can't give testimony to the contrary."

Chakotay turned to the ship. "Is that it?"

"We've barely begun." Q said. "Next stop, Starfleet Academy,
oh I'd guess about eight years before you went to bed."

---
What If They Had Never Left Starfleet?
---

He was ready to rip Q limb from limb when a very familiar
figure -- younger, but still familiar -- came into view.

Starfleet Cadet -- no, wait, if this were eight years ago,
she was probably an ex-cadet -- B'Elanna Torres groped
around for something to hurl. She didn't appear to care what
it was -- a rock, a padd, a tray, a hoverball -- so long as
it made some satisfying noise. Under her breath, she was
ranting, to the effect that this border-worlder was done
this time, done with the supercilious professors and
rulebook fetishists. She was done with the other cadets, who
either looked at her in envy and dislike when she answered
an engineering question or edged away in fear when she
snarled in temper during Parises Squares or some other
competition. She was done with the whole lot of them. She
stood for a second, taking aim at a distant tree, when a
polite little cough caught her attention.

Chakotay shook his head at his younger self. Didn't the
idiot know enough to recognize Torres in a temper? But he
had not met B'Elanna at the Academy -- hadn't been to Earth
that entire time.

She snapped out of her rage to consider the stranger in
front of her.

"What?" she growled, and annoyance colored her face red.

The man -- he was young but he was wearing the uniform of...

The older Chakotay saw the thoughts flit across her face.
This B'Elanna was less guarded than her older counterpart.

'Oh crap, a full-fledged officer. Not security, at least.
But why had they had sent a commander after her?'

"I didn't do it," she said, automatically.

Chakotay evaluated the younger man. This Chakotay's face and
forehead were unmarked. At B'Elanna's assertion, the young
Chakotay raised his eyebrow just a fraction. "I didn't say
you did anything. Just a friendly word -- Boothby doesn't
like mudslinging, of any variety."

B'Elanna blinked at him, then looked at her hand -- it
hardly felt like part of her body. She was holding a dirt
clod. She dropped it over the flowerbed. It fell apart, but
there was nothing satisfying in its destruction. She wiped
her hand on her uniform.

"Torres," she announced, extending her hand to his.

She wasn't a cadet anymore, so she could use a civilian form
of greeting.

"Chakotay."

"What department do you teach in?" she asked, because it was
the polite thing to do.

"I'm not a teacher. Yet. I'm here to trade in my wings," he
said.

Her jaw dropped at the same time as the older Chakotay's.
"Are you crazy?" popped out of her mouth before she could
filter it.

"Debatable. Why do you ask?"

"No one survives this place for four years and then works
his way to commander only to resign."

"My world just got traded to the Cardies."

Oddly, Chakotay who had served Voyager for five years could
read B'Elanna more easily than he could read this second
self.

"I'm sorry," B'Elanna said awkwardly. She hadn't been happy
on Kessik IV, but if it were traded away by the organization
she served, she would be pissed too. She was usually pissed
anyway, but then she'd have a reason beyond a lousy
childhood and a forehead that announced her heritage to the
universe.

They stood in silence for a second longer.

"What will you do now?" she asked.

"I've been offered a nice desk job," he admitted. "Starfleet
doesn't want us border-worlders out on the front line.
Worried that we'll go native or get sympathetic with the
people who don't want to leave their land."

"You going to take it?" she asked. It was a crucial
question, suddenly, because she was also from some
nowhere-planet that the Earth-born had never even heard of.
If they didn't trust a proven commander, why would they give
a moody cadet a chance to prove herself on a ship? What if
they wanted her to quit, or spend all her days behind a
desk? Her resolve hardened. B'Elanna Torres wasn't a
quitter. But, on the other hand, she'd die behind a desk.
She needed action, stimulation -- she needed space.

He nodded slowly. "I can help my people more here," he said.
"What could I do if I went rogue?"

She shrugged.

"My father is a storyteller. I don't have his way with
words, but I see it like this," he explained, "There once
was a fly. It was at a picnic with many friends and family,
when an elephant came. The fly flew up to the elephant, and
stung the beast, hoping that the sting would chase it away
from the party. Instead of sending the elephant away, the
fly enraged it, and the elephant ran over the picnic,
crushing the other flies, and the feast."

He looked at her, hoping she understood. She did.

B'Elanna nodded approval. "You're a smart one, aren't you?"

"I'm just trying to do what's right."

She sighed, wistfully, because he was so certain about what
was right.

"Does your family understand?"

"Some days more than others," Chakotay admitted, "So what
didn't you do?"

She shrugged.

"You a cadet?"

"For now," she allowed. "Engineering."

"Yeah?" He raised one eyebrow. "I took a few classes, but I
got lost when they started explaining why we'll never
manufacture ships that break warp 10."

B'Elanna sighed explosively.

"Trust me, someone out there is going to break 10. People
decided we can't because they assume that the difference
between warp 10 and warp 10.1 is the same as the difference
between 9.8 and 9.9. But it's not a clean logarithmic or
exponential relationship."

And then she spouted off so much technical jargon he
wondered which corner of her brain stored it all.

"I mean, it's like people don't want to move past the
Einsteinian world view, even though Cochrane... "

"Same problem when idiots were clinging to Newton eighty
years after... "

At the end of it, the young officer nodded, as though he
understood. His older not-quite-self felt the same
bewilderment.

"I thought they didn't cover advanced warp theory until
third year."

"I got permission from the instructor, but I think he's
going to throw me out. I'm the only cadet who isn't too
cowed to question him." Frustration that had not had time to
ripen into bitterness filtered through her voice.

Voyager Chakotay felt the urge to laugh and groan. Chapmen.
Of course.

"Most profs who treat you like that are trying to train you
for situations when you have to communicate information to a
superior who might be too preoccupied to listen. It's not
supposed to happen, but none of us are perfect. I bet he
wants to make sure he's sending out officers who find a way
to speak their minds, even to senior officers."

B'Elanna took a moment and actually thought about their
interactions in that light.

"I wouldn't put it past Chapmen. On the syllabus, there's
something about the course preparing you for life with your
captain and crew."

Chakotay laughed, but kindly.

"Oh, you must be first year -- second at the most. Everyone
I know gave up reading syllabi by the time they got to third
year."

B'Elanna stiffened, unsure if she were being criticized.

"Come on, let's walk back," he invited. "I have to find a
desk somewhere near the fossils Starfleet digs up for the
archeology department."

"Ha. Ha," B'Elanna said sarcastically, though the pun
actually did amuse her.

"I'll see you around then, maybe?"

"Us colonists have to stick together." He nodded.

Chakotay of Voyager watched them go. The Q father and son
team reappeared. Before he could question them, the world
was elasticizing again, and he was somewhere else.

"Next stop -- how your present would look if you had talked
to B'Elanna Torres after the Bothan gave you those lovely
hallucinations."

---
What If They Had Talked After "Persistence of Vision?"
---

Chakotay didn't even bother being outraged that Q knew the
contents of his Bothan and hormone-induced daydream. He'd
seen -- Well, he had even partially known it was a fantasy,
but it was so tempting, he really hadn't wanted to wake up.
Chakotay was enough of a realist to recognize that his dream
world was more attractive than the reality that surrounded
him.

He'd always been terrified of losing himself in his own mind
-- his grandfather had instilled that. The Indian kept a
tight leash on how much imagining and supposing and
what-might-have-beening he did, while he explored his
spirituality with the help of the akoonah. It was something
of a paradox—he feared becoming lost in his mind, but he
regularly explored it. But the akoonah allowed him to guide
the exploration; Chakotay made it a point to know his mind
and spirit. Even while he'd known, on some level, that what
the Bothan was showing him was far too good to be true, he'd
allowed himself the weakness of believing. He never really
forgave himself for that.

In his fantasy, he'd woken from a dream in his own bed on
Dorvan V. He was in a room that he and his father and their
kin had built. The dream had been disturbing—Dorvan enslaved
to the Cardassians, himself and his crew far from the bones
of the ancestors. And there were so many details! He could
still see the love of duty on the face of the Captain and
the shining eagerness to survive the adventure and go home
that animated the young ensign. But it was so distant from
that moment, when he woke, wrapped around a warm woman, in a
blanket his sister had woven. When he woke, the smell of his
mother's cooking -- a flat bread of some kind — filled his
senses.

He'd felt the sun of a new day rub lovingly against his
skin, coaxing him to rise and join his father in welcoming
the day. He'd kissed the shoulder of the woman in his bed,
knowing (he couldn't say how he knew, only that the knowing
went to the very center of his being) that she was the
partner of his life. She'd rolled over as he dressed. He'd
pulled on a slightly rumpled shirt and slid into well-worn
work pants. It was only then that he'd looked at the woman
-- he'd known her already by her scent and by the way her
body had fit against his. B'Elanna had yawned and stretched
like a cat. His mouth went dry when he noted the tribal mark
on her forehead and the wedding band on her left hand — the
twin to the one he hadn't realized he was wearing.

"Don't look at me like that."

And her entire body had blushed.

"Either come back here and join me or go away and let me
sleep," she'd murmured drowsily.

With an invitation like that, there really wasn't another
choice.

Chakotay had never spoken of that fantasy -- of morning on a
sun-soaked bed in the Alpha Quadrant. He'd even had some
trouble looking at B'Elanna for a bit, because it always
inspired a little shiver of -- what? Lust? Hope?
Disappointment? He couldn't define it, even though he tried.
By the time things had shaken out a bit, he barely realized
that B'Elanna had been avoiding him as much as he had been
avoiding her.

But he now drifted behind his counterpart as the younger
Chakotay walked along the corridor outside the messhall, the
night of the Bothan attack. B'Elanna exited the messhall,
walking rapidly. She ran into Chakotay, sending both back.

"Chakotay," she stammered.

"B'Elanna."

The older Chakotay winced at the way the younger Chakotay's
voice cracked over the word. Had he sounded that rattled?

Luckily -- or maybe, unluckily -- B'Elanna was embarrassed
enough that she barely noticed Chakotay's discomfort.

"Good work with the remodulation," he said finally.

"I'm sorry I didn't make it down in time to help."

Shame and something else colored the Commander's face red.

B'Elanna turned even more red.

"Um, that's okay. You were there how I needed you."

The older Chakotay, free of this awkward dance, watched the
strike and parry disguised as conversation with fascination.
It was like watching a holo of himself as a teenager. He
wanted to cringe with embarrassment at points, but was also
a touch in awe of how utterly oblivious he'd been. Was it
even so recently as three years ago that she looked at him
that way?

"Well, good night."

She was about to leave, as she had before. The Chakotay who
watched had let her go. But this time, this Chakotay touched
her arm.

"Wait, B'Elanna."

"What?" Her eyes met his in an aggressive stare.

"I'm sorry I disappointed you."

"What?" Her jaw dropped. "You didn't disappoint me! I'm the
one who failed -- I mean, Kes had to finish what I started.
It doesn't say much for the chief engineer if the ship's
nurse can do her job for her."

Chakotay shook his head.

"You are the only person on this ship who figured out a way
to disrupt the psionic field. It may be the reason the alien
focused on you. It's to your credit that your process for
working is rational enough that someone with Kes's training
on our systems was able to extrapolate a solution."

She coughed a laugh.

"Me, rational? I'm all intuition, Chakotay. But I got
distracted. In the old days, in the Maquis, that lack of
focus would've killed us. Am I getting soft?"

"No," he reassured her. She relaxed. "Old, maybe, but not
soft," he teased.

She hit his shoulder, returning the teasing, though she was
still uneasy.

"Thank you," she said, after a moment. "Do you want to talk
about what you saw?"

"Not really," Chakotay made an effort not to flinch. "Do
you?"

"No," B'Elanna said, short and sharp.

They laughed a little then, but awkwardly. They were
standing in the hall, but no one had passed them yet.

"I felt like I was at home, in bed, on Dorvan V, waking up
from a weird dream about the Delta Quadrant. The Cardassians
never attacked, and everything was just in its place."
Chakotay confessed.

"My mother was making bread and singing. My father was
greeting the sun. And... " He stopped.

"And?" B'Elanna asked, curious as to what in this made him
uncomfortable, and even more embarrassed that her own
fantasy had been so physical.

"My wife was sleeping with me, that's all."

"Wife?" B'Elanna's eyebrows shot up. "I didn't know... "

"I'm not really married. It was part of the dream, that's
all," Chakotay said.

B'Elanna refused to ask whom he had hallucinated about
bringing home. She supplied instead, "I uh, well, you came
in and helped me finish setting up the interruption and then
we celebrated a little."

Chakotay smiled. "Celebrated?"

She looked a bit arch. "Well, what did you and your wife do
when you found out you were safe at home?"

Chakotay's younger self stepped back, "Celebrated," he said.
"You and I, we celebrated."

"Me?" That flabbergasted tone of B'Elanna's made Chakotay
step closer, the better to follow her if she ran away.

"You," he confirmed, stepping even closer.

"Me?"

"You."

She shivered.

He had just raised a hand to touch her cheek when Harry came
around the bend of the corner, took one look at them, turned
scarlet and fled.

The moment was broken, and each stepped back a little.

"So, um, early duty shift tomorrow."

B'Elanna mumbled.

"Me too."

Chakotay took her hand and caressed it.

"We'll talk again."

B'Elanna was so flustered that she nearly walked into the
wall in the course of her retreat.

The commander was no more collected as he walked the other
direction. His face suggested he was doing some thinking,
and most of it was pleasant.

Their unseen observer found himself shaking his head.
B'Elanna had always recoiled from the awkwardness of facing
her lover -- after the Day of Honor, she had barely faced
Tom for the better part of a week. And Spirits, she had
hidden from Tuvok, Neelix, Tom and even Chakotay, using
judiciously placed padds and snarls after the pon farr
incident. She'd been okay with Vorik, but then, the ensign
had been so wretched that one of them had had to be okay.

Her awkwardness didn't surprise him, though her admission of
her vision did. But his own actions took him off guard.
Would he have told his B'Elanna what he saw, if he had
bumped into her when it was all so fresh in his mind? And
when did she become "his," even mentally?

Chakotay waited for Q to appear.

"So what's the point? That in every other reality, B'Elanna
is important to me?"

Q tisked.

"My dear Commander, have you forgotten that we have only
seen three possible pasts? Have you forgotten the way the
spirits worked in Dickens' novel? That's another piece of
art Little Q is pondering these days. First, they reveal the
pleasant past, and then they expose the hell that might yet
be."

The world elasticized, and Chakotay braced himself against
nausea. It only took a moment to orient himself. They were
on the supply ship where he met B'Elanna, seven years ago --
no, wait, four years before the scene he had just witnessed.
Great spirits, he despaired of understanding the best tenses
to use to think about time travel.

---
What If They Didn't Meet?
---

The cargo bay of the nameless little transport ship was a
wreck. The crates of supplies -- humanitarian and otherwise
-- that the Bolian was transporting had shattered and
scattered. Kurt Bendera led, while Seska appraised what
supplies they could salvage, tricorder in hand. Chakotay of
the Maquis looked for survivors, hauling a medical
tricorder. Ayala held up the rear, guarding from ambush.

"Holy shit," Bendera finally announced. "There's no way the
Cardies did this."

"What do you mean?" Seska bristled. "They're not a competent
enemy?"

Voyager Chakotay followed behind them, wishing he could give
them some warning of Seska's true nature. His blood ran a
little hotter as he stared at the woman who would betray him
to the Cardassians and the Kazon.

"No, that's just it. They're completely competent." Ayala
thoughtfully continued the analysis.

"They would never break stuff and leave it for us to
salvage. They'd break it, piss on it, set it on fire and
then blow up the ship for good measure," Bendera explained.

Chakotay played devil's advocate. "You don't think the
Bolian did this?"

"No, Dalby already found what was left of him on the
bridge," Seska announced.

Ayala tensed. "You think there was someone else on board?"

"Maybe," Chakotay said. "There isn't anymore though. No life
signs." He indicated the tricorder.

"We should look for smuggling compartments. Those are always
shielded. If the captain stuck somebody down there, the
tricorders wouldn't know," Bendera pointed out.

"I think we found our guy." Ayala stopped suddenly.

"Alive?" Seska demanded.

The other three formed on Ayala, to see what he had seen.
The ghostly officer floated along, seeing what they saw,
both in memory and in this timeline.

Chakotay scanned the Cardassian.

"Dead."

Seska approached the soldier. "His ribs are cracked
somehow." Despite herself, the Cardassian spy was impressed.
"Through armor. That stuff can handle a phaser at
point-blank range. Someone was mad as hell, to do this."

"That how he died?" Bendera asked.

"No," Chakotay answered. "It looks like he got clocked in
the head with... something heavy and dull."

"Who did it?" Ayala voiced the question in all their minds.

"Back here."

Bendera somehow spotted a trail in the debris, and traced it
around and back, to a second Cardassian and a part-Klingon
girl. Voyager Chakotay turned away. When he'd met B'Elanna,
the Klingon had a broken jaw but she'd come out swinging.
Not this time.

The Cardassian had been shot with his own phaser. The girl
on the deck also bore phaser wounds, but it was a toss up
whether those had killed her or the fallen crates of food,
half on her and half on the deck.

Ayala's eyes dared Bendera to make a joke about it being a
matter of time before the food killed somebody in the
Maquis, but the most jovial rebel had nothing to say.

Three pairs of eyes fastened on Chakotay as he scanned
B'Elanna's broken body with the tricorder. He shook his head
and averted his eyes for a moment.

The older Chakotay wondered why he was the medic in this
universe -- hadn't that been Seska?

"She's just a kid," Ayala said finally.

Bendera's voice was thick as he asked, "What the hell was
she doing here?"

"She's older than some of our recruits," Seska pointed out.
"She probably wanted a job and a ticket offworld. She's
still wearing an engineer's utility belt. Bet you a pack of
jamba juice the Bolian hired her to keep this pitiful tub
together long enough for him to drop his cargo."

"She didn't go easy. Look at this place," Bendera said. He
followed the angles of the phaser wounds with his eyes, as
well as the smashed crates and debris.

Chakotay sighed. "Let's get the supplies over to the ship.
We'll give her a burial at space and tow the ship back to
the Badlands. We can probably fix it up enough for at least
one kamikaze run."

Seska busied herself with the communicator and Bendera and
Ayala started searching for crates that could take in the
contents of the broken boxes. Chakotay sat on his heels for
a moment, looking at the teenager.

"I wonder what her name was."

He straightened her limbs, closed her eyes and joined his
friends without further comment.

The older Chakotay stared at the body of the woman who had
become his best friend, in another life. Did this Chakotay
feel how important the girl could've been to him? Did he
feel anything, to plan her funeral so casually?

It was almost an afterthought when he realized that Seska
had activated a communicator and beamed away, as the ship
disintegrated around them. He felt almost numb as Q popped
in again.

"Why did you show me this?" Chakotay managed to ask. He was
furious -- and fury was not an anger that rose easily in the
first officer of Voyager.

"Tut tut, questions later."

Q tipped his head.

Chakotay's curse was lost in the shimmering of the scene
around them.

"No more. I'm not your plaything. Take me home NOW."

Q huffed.

---
What If He Took All Those Things That Never Happened
and Acted On Them?
---

Chakotay woke shuddering. He made his way to his bathroom
and splashed water on his face, trying to break the dream's
spell. It had been so vivid, so strange. Why would Q, of all
creatures, appear in his unconscious mind to lead him
through a Dickensian tour of his past? And why would he
dream of B'Elanna so vividly, when she was right here, whole
and safe? What about the anniversary of losing the tribe
would cause this much angst?

He was sitting on the deck with his medicine bundle,
meditating but not questing, when a light tone alerted him
that he had a visitor. He looked up as B'Elanna entered. She
was still dressed in the Parises Squares gear from earlier
in the night. She took in his pajamas, his tired face and
his meditation posture in an instant.

"Were you trying to sleep already?"

"Slept and woke up. I just wanted this day to be over."

B'Elanna squatted next to him. "It's been chasing you all
day, hasn't it?"

"I was never a good son while my father and the people were
around. I don't know why I still keep vigil on the day I
lost them." Chakotay felt vaguely uneasy.

"Because you are a good man," B'Elanna said simply. "Even if
you're bull-headed about it. I don't get you. You comfort
everyone else. You send Sam Wildman a card for her
anniversary; you never forget a Bajoran holiday. But when
you need some sympathy, you lock yourself in here. There's
no way you would let me get away with this kind of sulking.
You'd bring me to the holodeck and get me to hit stuff until
my defenses were down and I started talking, even though at
the beginning, I thought that was the last thing I wanted to
do."

"I don't sulk." It popped out without Chakotay's control.

B'Elanna rocked back on her heels.

"Really? Then why didn't you come back to the holodeck?"

"I thought you'd want to play nurse with Paris for a while."

"Is that the real reason, or do you want to make me mad so
that I'll leave? Because I didn't exactly invite Paris."

Chakotay raised an eyebrow. So she wasn't using the
affectionate "Tom," but rather the irritated "Paris?"

B'Elanna explained, "He whined his way into coming tonight
and he over-exaggerated how badly he hurt himself. I'm
starting to remember why he annoyed me. Plus, healthcare
games aren't my style. You pretending that you think they
are is one of the stupidest jokes you've made in years. And
I've known you long enough to have plenty of choices."

"True, but I'm sure I've said worse things." Chakotay
winced. "Anything about trusting Seska? That has to top the
list."

B'Elanna sat back and waited for him to talk.

"It's not that it's you, so much. I had this dream and I
don't know what it means yet."

"Stop. This is me, Chakotay. B'Elanna. The one who always
tells you the truth about how much longer we can hold the
ship together. Talk to me like you used to. Remember? Kurt
said one time that you talked to me like a second self."

Chakotay finally looked at her, at her face, instead of an
inch above her head or the deck in front of her, or his
hands. And he saw that expression that the B'Elanna of three
years ago had favored his counterpart with. So he began to
speak, without knowing exactly what he was saying, hoping
that in her mercy as his friend, she would understand what
he didn't know how to articulate.

At the end of the telling, she helped him wrap up his
medicine bundle, without comment. He was too exhausted to
wonder if he had offended her. By now, he knew B'Elanna, and
knew that he wouldn't have to ask if she were offended. This
was something else -- but he didn't have time to puzzle it
out. She led him to his room and told him to sleep.

And, as though under compulsion, he closed his eyes, missing
the slight shimmering in the corner. If he had opened his
eyes, he might have sees Q grinning at Little Q. But he
heard the voice, as though from a distance, as he drifted to
sleep. In later years, he could never convince himself that
he had not heard another ancient poem (the annoying deity
seemed to be trying to teach his son quite a range of Earth
literature)

"If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is
mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions
did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding
but a dream."

---

The End