The BLTS Archive- Stones Left Unturned
by monkee (wiecek@earthlink.net)
and nanda (nanda@celticweb.com)

---

Author's Notes: nanda says: I wrote the first part of this story in
June 1999, when I was drowning in my opus-in-progress (it's *still* in
progress as of February 2001) and needed a break. I called the Word
file "shore leave fluff." These were my original author's notes (yes,
I'm very strange--or egotistical--and I write them first): "Image
supplied by photographs in Smithsonian magazine. Friendship supplied
by KMH. The pebbles were, naturally, my evil twin nanette's idea. It's
all she's good for, really."

The file lounged about on my hard drive for a long time. But I liked
the feel and the imagery, and I thought *someone* should do something
with it, so I offered it to monkee. I told her she could do whatever
she wanted with it--and of course, monkee being monkee, she turned it
into a lot more than fluff. And she did it so gracefully that I can't
tell where my beginning left off and her ending started. She's
amazing, but we all knew that already.

monkee says: After nanda sent the story to me, it lounged on MY hard
drive for a long time, too. I didn't know quite what to do with it,
although nanda and I exchanged some emails about the beauty of
male/female friendships and how maybe sometimes that was really much
better than a romantic relationship. After 'Shattered' aired, though,
I found my angle. I loved 'Shattered,' and one of the things I liked
best about it was the comfortable and close friendship Janeway and
Chakotay seemed to have in the 'real time' scenes. Then I remembered
them standing among the mysterious stones in nanda's story, and
thought that sounded like a nice beginning to a beautiful friendship.

At the risk of turning this into a mutual admiration page, I do want
to point out that all of the brilliant things in this story - the
blue, the ebbing and flowing air currents, and, of course, the stones
- are all nanda's. I finished it mostly so her incredible beginning
wouldn't go to waste!

---

::tap:: ::tap:: ::tap::

Kathryn Janeway looked up from her PADD. That sounded like... It
sounded like pebbles hitting her window. It was a sound that brought
her back many years--a boy out on the lawn, Kathryn and Phoebe
giggling. She thought for a minute: it was not easy to remember
herself as that person.

She didn't think she'd heard the sound since. It must be her
imagination.

::tap:: ::tap:: ::bounce::

One of the pebbles shot in through the open window. It was red, as the
rocks on this part of the planet were. It skidded across the floor and
stopped by her bare feet. She moved it a little with her toe. And she
smiled. He had good aim.

She went to the window, opened it further, and leaned on the
windowsill. She was staying in a small guest home, and the bedroom was
on the second floor. He was camping nearby.

"Truce," she called to the grinning figure below. Even at night, this
planet's atmosphere refracted light from the distant sun and cast a
bluish glow over everything she could see. Including him. "What do you
think you're doing, Commander?"

"Throwing rocks at your window. I saw your light. It's too beautiful
out here to sleep. Come outside."

"I'm busy. I'm reading."

"You mean you're busy reading reports."

He was right, of course, and it made her a little angry at being found
out. Not enough to ruin her good mood, though. "I'll spend my shore
leave how I like, thank you very much."

"You can take a PADD anywhere. You won't see this anywhere else. Come
outside."

She hesitated, and she knew he could tell she was tempted. In the blue
light she could see the hope in his eyes, but it was a veiled
hope--protecting itself because it knew it was likely to be dashed.

"Twelve hours left of shore leave, Kathryn."

She tried to think of the reasons to say no. There must be some.

She couldn't remember any of them.

"All right. I'll be down in a minute."

"Wear shoes you can climb in."

"Excuse me?"

"Just do it, Kathryn."

She found him standing by the stone wall. The air held a chill and
seemed to ebb and flow, like waves, only they were many kilometers
from this planet's oceans. Everything, everything was blue.

Chakotay bounced on the balls of his feet, something she'd never seen
him do before. She hid a smile by turning to look at the landscape.

"It's gorgeous," she said, spinning slowly. Low hills rolled away from
them, beyond the wall. A grove of trees--they weren't quite trees;
they photosynthesized, but they didn't have bark, or recognizable
leaves--stood in neat rows just past the guesthouse. Small,
oval-shaped fruits dangled gracefully from the ends of each limb. The
wind made their shadows dance. "Is this what I'm supposed to see?"

"Didn't you see it from your window?"

"Somebody was throwing rocks at me. Made it difficult to see the
view."

"Uh-huh."

He was teasing, and she was happy to play along. "What is that
supposed to mean?"

"One of Paris' twentieth-century cliches. 'Stop and smell the roses.'"

"There are no roses."

"No? Well, maybe we can find something better."

"I think you're teasing me, Commander."

"I think you're right. Should I stop?"

"If I said yes, would you?"

"No."

"Then no."

He laughed, and she joined him, quietly. It felt like she hadn't
laughed in months. He was so good at getting her to take herself less
seriously--herself, the ship, the entire damn delta quadrant. Often,
she refused to let him sway her, refused to give in to the playful
sparks in his eyes.

"Lead on, MacDuff," she said, sweeping her arm through the air. He
started walking, and she followed.

"More of Paris' cliches?"

"It's from Shakespeare, Chakotay. MacBeth. Surely you read Shakespeare
in school?" She had never cared much for it, herself. She'd put up
with literature and history lessons only as long as she'd had to.

"I suspect you had more dead white men in your curriculum than I had
in mine."

True enough. They fell into a comfortable silence as he led her to a
trail that climbed slowly uphill. The ground was rocky here, and on
the other side of the hill, she knew, there were vast, red fields of
stone. The owner of her guesthouse had handed her a map and told her
she should visit them. She hadn't planned on it.

"Where's your camp?" she asked.

He pointed off to their right. "About a hundred meters that way. You
could see it if I had a fire lit."

He had a light strapped to his wrist, and occasionally he turned to
illuminate a rough spot in the trail for her. The path wasn't steep,
but some of the rocks were unstable, and the refracted light cast
deceptive shadows. They scrambled over the largest stones.

She felt reckless, and a little wild, and free. She stopped to look
behind her and was surprised to hear herself laugh.

"You okay?" Chakotay called from a few meters up the hill.

"Fine. Just admiring the view."

"It gets better."

She turned in time to see him smiling down on her.

"Thank you," she said, not quite sure what she meant.

He chuckled. "Oh, don't thank me yet."

He waited for her to catch up.

They walked for nearly an hour, cresting the hill and starting down
the other side. Finally he stopped, holding out a hand behind him to
signal her to stop, too. He turned off his wrist beacon.

"What is it?" she whispered.

He pointed ahead, to where the terrain leveled out. "There. Do you see
them?"

"See what? Animals?"

"No. The rocks. Look."

It took a minute for her eyes to adjust. She realized they had reached
the stone fields, but they were nothing like she had expected. The red
rock here was smooth, almost flat, and she couldn't see any cracks. It
extended for as far as she could see in the pale light. She wondered
what the stone was composed of; she'd have to take a sample back to
the ship and have it analyzed.

But what Chakotay had pointed out was not the stone fields, but the
smaller rocks on top of them. They were a different color, maybe a
light brown, she couldn't be sure. The smallest was about the size of
a watermelon, and the largest was half as tall as Chakotay. They all
seemed alive under the blue light.

And they all seemed to have dug grooves in the stone.

Each of the brown rocks had what looked like a trail following it on
one side; some of them ran parallel, some curved across each other in
intricate designs. Without any equipment she couldn't say for certain,
but her intuition told her that the trails formed a complex geometric
pattern. She studied it, trying to find the connection, almost
overwhelmed by a sense that it was too large, too grand, for her to
see.

But that was silly. Stones didn't leave trails. Stones didn't *move*
except by an outside force.

Or were these strange stones like the strange trees, not completely
one thing or the other in her vocabulary? An image of a horta flashed
in her mind.

She realized she'd moved closer to Chakotay, and was standing on her
toes, with her hands on his shoulders for balance. She must have
tried, unconsciously, to make herself taller to see the pattern. He
had turned his head slightly, to watch her.

"Is that what I think it is?" she asked him.

"Appears to be. I was here this afternoon."

"Rocks don't move."

"I know. I asked the ambassador before I came to see you. He said
they're not sure, themselves, what causes it, but those rocks do move.
They've marked them and followed them through the seasons."

"Amazing. I could see how wind or water might move one of those rocks,
if the conditions were right--but how could they make those grooves?"
She answered her own question. "Magnetic properties, maybe."

"That seems to be their going theory."

"And I think--I'm not sure--I think they're making some sort of
pattern. I think if you measured all those lines, there'd be a
predictable relationship, in degrees of angles and arcs."

She felt rather than saw him smile. "He said that ancient cultures
based their sacred geometry on the designs."

"I can see why. Come on. Let's go look."

This time she led him. She ran her fingertips over the rocks, knelt by
them to examine their undersides. She tried to move them, and failed,
and watched Chakotay try and fail. She walked in one of the grooves
while Chakotay walked in another, and they crossed each other's paths.
She wondered if earlier inhabitants had also walked the lines this
way, using them as an aid to meditation. Many cultures throughout the
galaxy built labyrinths for that purpose. She stood on one of the
tallest rocks to see more.

Eventually Chakotay sat, leaning up against one of the stones as she
explored. She walked another line, then another, calling out to him
whenever she found something of interest. Finally she returned to lean
on a stone close to his, so they were facing each other.

"Glad you came?" he asked, still teasing. But she heard a trace of
something else in his voice, something smaller and lonelier.

She wondered when they had last done anything like this, even on the
holodeck. Just spent time together, enjoying each other's company.
They had worked hard to build this friendship, over the years, and she
knew she'd been neglecting it lately. It was easy for her to assume he
needed nothing, to forget that he depended on her as much as she
depended on him.

"Oh, yes," she said. "This is incredible. Thank you, Chakotay."

"I knew you'd like it, Kathryn," he said. "The stones, and smelling
the roses."

She smiled and nodded in acknowledgement. Privately, she vowed to
spend more time with him, just doing nothing. She glanced around at
the silent, looming stones. They were almost glowing in the hazy blue
of the night. A sudden breeze washed over them sharply, unimpeded by
vegetation on the rock plain. She shivered, but knew it was not just
the cold - it was the surreal, almost eerie setting.

She offered Chakotay her hand, to help him up. "It's late," she said.
"And it's cold. Maybe we'd better go."

"Lead on, MacDuff," he said, grinning.

It was impossible not to smile at him.

Half an hour later, however, neither of them was smiling much. They
had to concentrate too hard on their footing. The rocks on the trail
that on the way up the hill had been a minor inconvenience were now
downright treacherous. Several times she tripped, and stumbled
down-slope, waving her arms gracelessly until she was able to grab
onto either a tree or Chakotay. Ultimately, however, it was Chakotay
who fell and wrenched his ankle.

"Naturally neither of us thought to bring a med-kit," she said, wryly,
after inspecting the ankle and deciding that it wasn't broken. "What
would the Doctor say?"

"It's not that bad," Chakotay said, as she helped him to his feet. "I
can live with it. And I do have a med-kit back at camp."

They started back down the hill, this time walking more deliberately.
Chakotay was hobbling slightly, but managed to keep up. She supported
him whenever an occasional misstep made him hiss in discomfort.
Finally, he led her off the trail. The picked their way through the
underbrush and came to a clearing where he had a small tent set up,
and a fire ring.

He grimaced as he sat down with his back against one of the odd trees.
She dug the med-kit out of his pack and scanned his ankle.

"It's just bruised," she confirmed. She set the hypo to anaprovolene
and handed it to him.

"Here," she said. "Take care of your ankle, and I'll light a fire."

She could easily have found her way back to the guesthouse alone, and
he could simply have turned in and slept until his ankle felt better
in the morning, but she was still too keyed up from the walk, the
light, the mysterious stones. She didn't want this time to end just
yet. He didn't protest, either, so she pulled out the med-kit's
lighter, and set up some logs and kindling.

"If you were a true pioneer, you wouldn't use that," he said,
indicating the lighter.

"I'd rather not have to hack off another chunk of my hair, thank you,"
she shot back, smiling.

He grinned in acknowledgement as he put the hypo back in the med-kit
and flexed his ankle gingerly. Then his face relaxed. "Much better,"
he said.

She lit the fire. The odd wood burned well. The flames were high, and
hot, and the orange-red was a brilliant contrast to the blue all
around them. She moved away from it and joined him by the tree.  She
plopped down beside him and sat with her back against the trunk, too.
She watched as he idly picked up small pebbles and tossed them into
the fire.

They sat in companionable silence for a while, just watching the
flames. Then she began to become aware of him in a way that she hadn't
in quite a while. The way they were sitting, their shoulders and hips
were touching and the contact suddenly felt sensitive...electric. She
felt a conflicted impulse to either get up and walk away from him, or
melt into him completely. She used to feel this way often around him -
now, it was rarer. He shifted beside her, then stilled.

"Kathryn?" he asked, softly. "Do you ever regret that we didn't let
our relationship go to another level?"

She smiled, a little sadly. So, he'd felt it too.  "Yes," she
admitted. "Often. Right now, for instance."

She didn't look at him, but she knew he was smiling. "I could make
love to you right now, Kathryn," he said, in a tone that was more
speculative than seductive. He indicated the ground between them and
the fire. "Right here, right now, under all this blue...I could make
love to you, and I know...I know - we'd knock all those rocks up there
right off course."

It was her turn to shift a little. But she also couldn't help
laughing. "We'd better not, then," she said. "We'd mess up the
symmetry."

He laughed and rolled his head sideways on the trunk of the tree to
look at her. "I don't really even want to anymore," he said. "Because
it would change everything, and I just don't want to take the chance."

"I agree," she said. "I think our time is past. Or it just wasn't
meant to be. But I like things the way they are. I've never had a
friendship like this, Chakotay. It's important to me. And I almost
hate to admit this, but I like the tension between us, too. The spark.
Is that wrong?"

She watched his face in the firelight for a response. She did like it
- the pull, the touches, the attraction between them. But she didn't
want to toy with him, either.

"No," he said, smiling slightly, just enough to bring out his dimples.
"I like it, too."

She returned the smile and extended her hand. He grasped it and they
sat together, silently, watching the fire. The tension was gone now-
it had subsided into something warm, and comfortable. It hadn't really
been a rigorous hike, but it had been a long one, and it was quite
late. She closed her eyes and breathed in the cool, smoke-tinged air.
She tried to analyze the mystery of the rocks on the other side of the
hill, but found that she was just too tired to thing about it
logically. She drifted off, with disjointed images of blue hortas and
odd leafless trees swirling around in her head.

**POP**

Sometime later, an especially loud crackle from the fire ring jolted
her awake. The fire had burned down to glowing embers. She was still
holding Chakotay's hand, but he'd fallen asleep as well. His head
rested on hers. Gently, she moved away, careful not to wake him.

She knew she ought to go back to her guesthouse, but she just didn't
feel like picking her way back to the trail for the ten-minute walk.
So she threw a few more logs in the fire ring, and shuffled them
around until they ignited. Then she pulled a blanket out of Chakotay's
pack.

She returned to where he was, and knelt down beside him. She rarely
had an opportunity to just look at him, especially when he was asleep.
He looked younger, and handsome. Over the years, she had indeed been
tempted, but it was never the time. She used to think that perhaps
someday, if circumstances permitted, but even that seemed less and
less likely. They'd lived through too much, seen too much, knew each
other too well. She knew part of her would always regret what might
have been. But another part of her knew she'd never trade this for
anything.

A movement on his shoulder startled her and, scowling, she flicked an
insect with quite a few legs off his shirt. Then she carefully covered
him with the blanket and crawled underneath it as well. He mumbled
incoherently as she settled back in beside him, but before he stilled,
he put his head back on hers. She smiled, and closed her eyes.

---

When she woke at dawn, he was already up, moving about the campsite,
packing away his things. She shivered and pulled the blanket closer
around her.

"Good morning," he called over to her.

"Hmmph," she grumbled.

He grinned. "I think I have some coffee in my pack. Do you want me to
heat up some water for you?"

She thought for a moment. "No," she said. "I've got a better idea. Why
don't you come back to the house with me. I've got bread and fruit
there. And coffee."

"Sounds good," he said, still fumbling around in his pack. "Ah. There
they are," he said to himself. He walked over and stooped beside her,
holding out two rocks. She recognized them - one was the red bedrock
from this area, and the other was a small chunk of one of the brown
stones they'd seen last night.

"The ambassador gave them to me," he explained. "He said we were
welcome to analyze them if we wanted to."

She took the rocks from him and held them, rubbing her thumbs along
the edges, feeling for grains, or crystals. Sedimentary, Igneous,
Metamorphic...how had they formed? What kind of magnetic properties
might they have? Did they move in response to some kind of localized
magnetic field, or was it a planet-wide phenomenon? Were there other
fields like the one they'd seen? It was a fascinating scientific
puzzle.

But as she held the rocks, she remembered standing among them in the
blue of the night before. It had felt almost sacred, with the air
washing over them, and the rocks looking so mysterious and alive. Then
she had a sudden, sharp flashback - herself, walking between two large
standing stones, holding Kes, making an irreversible decision based on
faith alone.

She looked up at Chakotay. He was still squatting in front of her,
watching her think. "I don't think I want to know," she said. "Maybe
some things are better left unexplored."

He blinked, then smiled, shaking his head. "You're still able to
surprise me, after all these years," he said.  He took one of the
rocks from her, then jerked his head questioningly towards the woods.
She nodded, and they both stood up.

He hurled the rock far into the woods, and they listened as it crashed
to the ground through branches and underbrush. Then, because she
didn't feel like shedding her blanket just yet, she handed him the
rock she was holding, and he threw that one away, too.

They stood for a few moments, looking through the woods to the hill
beyond, and remembering. Then he turned to her, and said, "I do love
you, you know, Kathryn."

She smiled, and stood on her toes to kiss him lightly on the cheek. "I
love you, too, Chakotay," she said.

---

The End