Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/58860.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, Other
  Fandom:
      Star_Trek:_Voyager, Star_Trek_-_Various_Authors
  Relationship:
      Janeway/Chakotay
  Character:
      Chakotay, Kathryn_Janeway, Original_Male_Character
  Additional Tags:
      Angst, Maquis, Torture, Established_Relationship, Implied/Referenced
      Rape/Non-con, Bad_Sex, Anal_Sex, Consent_Issues, Confessions, Hiding,
      Tears, Cardassians, Sexual_Violence, Implied/Referenced_Underage_Sex,
      Mosaic, Leadership, Threats_of_Violence, Humiliation, Oral_Sex, Anal
      Play, Dark
  Collections:
      Your_Cruise_Director's_Love_Boat
  Stats:
      Published: 2002-02-02 Words: 4764
****** Penetrating ******
by cruisedirector
Summary
     Terrible things must have happened to the Chakotay in the Maquis.
Notes
     This story obviously crawled out of the same corner of my brain as
     "Underground." I started it in 1998. The details from Janeway's past
     come largely from Jeri Taylor's novel Mosaic.
She was shocked by the way he recoiled when she told him what she wanted.
After all, he'd been open to just about anything throughout their relationship.
She was the one who'd been resistant to changing the sexual status quo, though
the rules she'd tried to impose seemed ludicrous now even to her. She loved
him, but for months after she finally admitted she reciprocated his feelings,
she insisted that their passion couldn't become physical. He went along with
that -- no more than lingering kisses goodnight, embraces that didn't detach
quite as fast as they should have.
He must have known that necking would quickly follow, which she deemed
acceptable as long as it didn't go any further. Touching, too, was all right,
as long as it stayed at a certain level and nobody had an orgasm -- but after
the first time his body rebelled (to his great embarrassment) it was easier -
- no, necessary -- to conclude that they weren't really doing anything wrong as
long as most of the clothes stayed on. Even if she stopped wearing underwear
when she knew she was going to see him. She decided nothing they did counted if
they were on the couch, or bent over a table, or leaning back against her desk.
When inevitably she had found herself rationalizing away the night she'd just
spent naked in bed with him, their mouths between one another's legs, with the
justification that at least they hadn't actually made love, she'd decided that
she was being ridiculous.
He was overjoyed, almost comically grateful, adoring and tearful and so afraid
of hurting her that she had to impale herself on him just to prove she wouldn't
break. The first time wasn't exactly a script from a holo-romance, but it was
still pretty good considering how long it had been and how nervous she was, and
he was everything she could have dreamed -- passionate, uninhibited,
solicitous, even discreet, though he did replicate flowers for her the next
day. He was still more direct than she in asking for what he wanted, both
verbally and physically. She wasn't as comfortable taking his hand and putting
it precisely where she craved his touch, and the first time he'd grabbed her
head while she was kneeling between his legs, she'd nearly bitten him before
flying across the room and bursting into tears that weren't entirely from the
gag reflex. Of course, he had no way of knowing about Cheb and her first
miserable experiences with blow jobs, but she was humiliated and angry, and it
was only his utter remorse that coaxed her back.
So tonight, his abrupt, "You're kidding, right?" and sudden lack of erection
flabbergasted her.
"Don't tell me you've never done that."
"Actually...I never have. I have never made love like that."
"No one ever asked you to?"
"Only two people ever offered, and neither one had human physiology. One wasn't
even a woman."
"Is that the problem? You associate it with..."
"No. I just never wanted to."
She winced. It had been hard enough for her to find words to ask him, and he
had misunderstood her at first anyway. "Take me from behind" was such an
archaic, vague phrase. "Could we do it up the rear" was so crude that she had
trouble saying it, and when he still thought she just meant back-to-front, she
was ready to drop the whole idea, because there was no way she was going to say
"in the ass." Just then he realized what "up" meant, but he froze and rolled
off, asking if she was joking. She'd never felt so ashamed in her life.
"I guess you've done it before?" he inquired cautiously.
She snapped, "No."
"Then why do you want to?"
He sounded relieved. Like maybe she could be talked out of it. "Why did you
want me to tie you up with your turtleneck the other night? There aren't
exactly logical reasons for what people want to do in bed."
"You're right. Just...don't you think it would hurt?"
"If it does we can always stop."
"What if I like it and I always want to do it that way?"
She glared at him, exasperated. "Are you really worried about that?"
"I don't want to hurt you." Maybe he thought she had only suggested it to
impress him and that she didn't really expect to enjoy it. If he'd hurt someone
doing that once, and hadn't wanted to stop because he liked it, that would
explain his resistance. But then why wouldn't he just tell her so, instead of
lying about it? Even if it had been embarrassing or awful? Unless he'd been
forced into something...
She asked carefully, "Did the one who wasn't a woman want you on the bottom?"
"No. He wanted me to...you know. I wasn't interested."
"Because it was a man? Or because he wasn't human?"
"Because I wasn't interested. I'm sorry, I don't do whips or branding either.
Nothing that hurts that much."
"That's the third time you said that word."
She studied his face; he was refusing to meet her eyes. If he'd resisted and
someone had done it to him anyway, he might not be able to talk about it. And
he might be able to rationalize that he was being honest telling her he'd never
willingly done what she had asked. She rolled over so that her backside was no
longer affronting him, and buried her face against him. He embraced her, but
there wasn't a trace of arousal; his skin felt clammy.
After a few minutes, he sighed, "Sorry. Guess I'm more tired than I thought."
"Want a backrub?"
"That's OK."
"Tell me what's wrong."
"I don't want to talk about it, Kathryn." It was the most forceful tone he'd
ever used with her before, one that she'd rarely heard him use at all. She
raised herself up on an elbow to look at him.
"That's not like you, Chakotay." He jerked back from the sound of his name as
if he thought she was being sarcastic. She felt herself instinctively
gravitating towards her command persona as a defense mechanism, and tried to
calm down. "It's okay," she said.
His eyes squeezed shut. "No, it's not," he muttered. The glance that returned
to her was haunted. "Kathryn, please believe me, you don't want to hear about
this. It'll only upset you. I know you hate displays of weakness."
"That's not true." He rolled onto his side, curling away from her, but when she
touched his back he almost jumped out of the bed. "Sorry," she whispered,
pulling back herself while she tried to consider his words. They had been
calculated to hurt, and they had, but she needed to ignore that. "If you're
talking about what I think you're talking about, that's not a display of
weakness, it's a crime."
"Can we drop this, please? I've never pressured you to talk about your past."
That was true. He'd never tried to make her share anything she wasn't willing.
She swallowed hard and nodded, rolling onto her back, until eventually she knew
he was asleep.
They didn't make love for two days. On the third day, she found him in the
arboretum, crying.
He didn't know she was there at first. She watched him for a few minutes, not
meaning to intrude, but not knowing whether she should leave him like that. It
had taken her awhile to track him down -- evidently he hadn't wanted to be
found. Hadn't worn his comm badge, had used a command-level security code to
lock the door. While a yellow alert or ship-wide crisis would have come to his
attention and she could have used the comm system to demand that he contact
her, he'd done everything possible to guarantee that no one would find him by
accident. When the computer told her that he was not in his quarters or his
office or the mess hall or playing hoverball, she realized that he was avoiding
her.
She went looking for him anyway.
She didn't have a good explanation for searching the ship for him, which would
have seemed like an invasion of his privacy had she not been concerned about
the lengths to which he'd gone to keep his location a secret. The first officer
couldn't hide from the captain. But then, she could have found the first
officer easily with a simple alert. It was Chakotay she was looking for.
She wondered what he would have said if he'd found her in the arboretum,
crying. They had created the room when the plants outgrew the hydroponics bays,
and Kes realized that the ship could save energy to the holodecks if people had
natural gardens to walk in. It was not as well-tended now as it had been with
the Ocampa on board, but the faint aura of wildness made the room seem more
lush, more real. Some of the flowers were replicated, not growing naturally;
those needed replacement every few days. Chakotay was sitting by live foliage,
not too far from the artificial stream flowing through the room, his back
against a wall of stones.
She wouldn't have had to hide from him in the arboretum. He didn't hate
displays of weakness. His words still stung, no matter how much pain had
motivated them. She ended up not saying anything, just walking around behind
him to sit down pressed against his back. She felt him jolt, but he didn't turn
around. The air was thick and humid, even more so close to him, feeling him
sweating under the uniform, tears on the collar of his turtleneck and the
sleeve of his jumpsuit.
"I thought I forgot," he whispered.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I made you remember."
"I don't know why it still upsets me so much. Choice of weapon, I guess. The
Cardassians did worse things to me."
"It was the Cardassians?"
"Yes. But it wasn't me. I didn't lie to you."
"They made you watch?"
"They made me do it."
She went very still. "Oh, Chakotay."
"You sure you want to hear?" Not really, she wasn't, but if he was offering to
tell her, she knew how much he needed her to listen. "They took Krilah first,
my second on the mission. Her interrogation was fairly standard -- some
physical torture, some mind-games." His voice was steady; this was a
recitation, the part of the story he could frame in narrative form. "We could
all hear her screaming. But they didn't rape her or even strip her. Nothing
like that, even though that's what we assumed they'd do to the women. It's what
they did to Bajoran women for years. But they didn't. I don't know why. When
they tossed her back in the cell, her clothing wasn't that much worse than it
had been before we were captured.
"In a little while they came for Kurt, and they brought me in to watch. They'd
figured out I was the leader." He let her slip her hand into his own, and
clenched her fingers tightly as he continued: "Kurt was shackled, and shot with
neural stimulants when the interrogator didn't like what he said. He never
screamed. He threw up all over himself, and bled a lot from a neck wound he got
when we were captured. Finally he passed out. I thought he might be dead. It
was bad, but in a funny way it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be -- not
till afterwards. I always thought it would be just as hard to watch someone
under my command get tortured as it would be to get tortured myself, but it
wasn't. I was just glad that right then it wasn't me."
"I understand. I've been there, Chakotay." Not there exactly -- not in the same
cell while a member of her crew was tortured nearly to death right in front of
her -- but close. She thought about telling him about her own experiences as a
Cardassian captive. Would it would seem to be demeaning his own suffering,
given that she had escaped torture and had not even witnessed the worst of the
atrocities performed on her senior officer? She decided to try the common point
of empathy.
"I can't pretend to imagine what you went through, but I was a prisoner of the
Cardassians, too," she whispered. "They captured me and my mentor -- Tom's
father, Admiral Owen Paris. I could hear him screaming, and I couldn't do
anything. And I was glad it wasn't me. He was never the same afterwards, they
killed something in him, and I was even more glad it hadn't been me, even if I
could never admit it. It was sheer hell."
"You must have been younger than I was."
"I've watched crewmembers under my own command tortured as well. I don't think
age makes a difference, Chakotay."
"Yes it does. Tayim was fifteen. He told me he was eighteen. Bajorans look
older than humans during adolescence, so I believed him. I let him join the
Maquis like it was some training camp for martial arts. I didn't know until the
Cardassians tortured him that he was fifteen years old. Tayim Durr -- he came
looking for us. For the Maquis. The Cardassians killed both his parents. He was
fifteen..."
His hands were clutching hers so tightly that she thought she would lose
circulation. Ice cold, shaking. "What happened?" she asked quietly.
"They brought me in with him, too. I knew I had to stay calm. I needed
distance, I didn't expect to survive but I had to die without revealing any
important Maquis secrets. Stay in control. You know how it is -- I was already
weighing what I could afford to tell them -- what they might consider enough so
that they'd kill me without trying to find out what else I knew. Cal Hudson was
a friend of mine. I worked with Tom Riker on the plan for the Defiant theft, we
needed a Starfleet officer. I could have named all the spies on Deep Space
Nine."
"Starfleet didn't know that," she murmured, a little shocked. She supposed
she'd always rationalized that he was fighting for his own planet and his
people's autonomy; she'd tried not to think about the fact that he'd been a
high-ranking terrorist who'd committed atrocities and known about others. It
didn't seem very important right now. She could remember the stench of her cell
from before Justin rescued her, the cold, the terror. She and Chakotay had lost
their fathers to the same struggle. Even if they hadn't been fighting on the
same side, they'd been defending the same things.
"Starfleet didn't know shit." The vehemence of his outburst made her jump.
"Starfleet signed a fucking treaty without even doing its own fucking recon
about what was going on in the DMZ." His voice dripped contempt. "Starfleet
didn't care about what Cardassian soldiers routinely did to Bajoran women and
men and children during the Occupation. Tayim knew all about that. He'd seen
it. When they tortured him, he wasn't about to break no matter how young he
was. They realized that, and somehow they realized that torturing him was
getting to me more than it was getting to him." Chakotay's voice rose. "They
told him they were going to cut off his balls and make sure they finished off
his family line. They started calling him the names they call the Bajorans they
use to service them, then they stripped him. I started struggling then, I
couldn't help it, and they...they made me..."
"Shh," she said, before she realized that he might think she was trying to
silence him rather than calm him. They did need to keep quiet; his voice was
carrying, and they were not in a very private area of the ship. "You didn't
have a choice, Chakotay..." she soothed.
"I didn't have a choice. I didn't have a choice," he repeated. "They stripped
him. I thought they were going to take turns with him. They didn't sign any of
our nice clean amnesty agreements -- they don't have any established protocol
on the treatment of prisoners of war, did Starfleet know that?" He glared at
her and through her. "I thought I could stand it if they did it to me as long
as they didn't do it to him, you know? You know. When you announce that you
take full responsibility and your crew should be spared. I know you know. I
said, 'Not him, me. I'm the one you want.' It was a mistake. It gave them the
idea. They ignored me completely, they started asking him, was he my boyfriend,
was he my cunt, they did things to him to degrade him, then they were going to
kill him. For I can't tell you how long, they talked about how they were going
to kill him. Knife up the ass or drown him in their cum, because he was my
boyfriend."
"How did you stand it?" she whispered.
"They got interrupted by another soldier, to tell them that Kurt and Krilah and
a couple of the others had gotten away. So even though we knew it might be
fake, to get our hopes up and make us drop our guard, we thought they might be
out there. That maybe if we stayed alive, we could make it out. And the
Cardassians came back, saying they would find out what I knew and kill me
before the rescue team arrived -- then the fact that the others got away
wouldn't be as much of a loss. And they could leave my bones for them."
He wound down momentarily, breathing hard; she wasn't sure whether he'd inhaled
at any point during the previous several sentences. She asked, "Do you need a
drink?" but he waved her silent. Gathering himself, wanting to get it over
with. His hands disengaged from hers, clenching together in his lap, knees
drawn up to his chest. After a moment, he raised his eyes past her own to some
spot in the distance, seeing something thousands of light years further from
the Federation starship than Earth.
"It was the Gul's idea. I don't know if he really believed Tayim was my lover
or if he didn't care, he figured the effect on me would be the same either way.
They said they would kill him right there if I didn't. Cut him open and make me
eat his heart. They started slicing at him, and he looked right at me and said,
'Don't let them kill me like this.' I don't know what he thought I could do -
- maybe he expected me to put him out of his misery. Strangle him with my bare
hands. Maybe he believed the others would come back in time. The Cardassians
must have assumed they would leave us to die. Tayim was probably just stalling,
trying to stay alive. Or maybe he thought better me than them to do it to him,
I don't know. He asked me. 'Please, Chakotay.' He begged me. I still don't know
how I did it." He looked at her as if she had an answer, but she couldn't say a
word. His face twisted. "I must have been angry at him for expecting me to be
able to do it, that must be how."
"It's not your fault if you were angry. You weren't thinking clearly and it's
hard not to resent the person who names you during torture, even if you know he
was coerced..."
"That's no excuse. There's no excuse for what I did."
"It kept you alive."
"It kept me alive. It didn't save Tayim, he died when Kurt blasted through the
wall to get me out. He just folded himself up and took it. The Cardassians
stood around cheering, calling him names -- only him, not me. Every time I
slowed down they would wave the weapons at him and tell him he was a lousy
cunt, and Tayim would tell me not to stop. I guess after what they did to him
with the knives it wasn't so bad, but he was bleeding and I knew it hurt. I
kept trying to use my spit so it wouldn't hurt so much but it wasn't enough,
and it was disgusting and it stank. I knew if I didn't do it right they would
kill him. They kept telling him, if he wasn't good for me, they were going to
cut him up. But for some reason, when I thought about how much I hated them and
what I wanted to do to them, what it would feel like to butcher them, for some
reason, because of what they did to me, it had nothing to do with the act, but
I couldn't stop. I didn't know it was going to happen, but I couldn't have
stopped anyway. I did it, I did what they wanted..."
His voice strangled. She pressed her face against his bicep, thinking that he
hadn't taken a breath for a full minute. "There wasn't any way you could have
stopped it," she murmured. "It wasn't your fault, Chakotay -- none of it was
your fault."
His head lowered slowly into his hands as he realized he'd already testified to
the worst of it. "I couldn't," he agreed, acknowledging his culpability. "They
were cheering and laughing, all I could think about was how much I wanted to
slit their throats. I don't remember how it felt, just how humiliating it was.
When I got away from Tayim, he squatted on the floor and crapped the stuff out
-- it was mixed with his shit and smelled awful. The Cardassians made these
noises, and then finally they came after me -- they hooked me up to the neural
activator. Started asking me questions and shocking me, all the while beating
Tayim and saying the same things again...I can't remember exactly, there was so
much pain from that thing, and I was so ashamed of myself. Maybe I passed out.
I don't know."
His jaw clenched and unclenched, but his voice was steady when he looked up at
her. "That's it. Tayim was killed when the wall blasted open. Two of the
Cardassians died and we left another lying there with his legs blown off. They
got me out. No one asked me any questions."
"You never told anyone?"
"Nobody. The only person I ever tried to tell..." His face contorted again with
a different kind of rage. "I would have told Seska, but she always said it was
better if we didn't know exactly what they'd done to each of us. I thought it
was because she was Bajoran, because they'd..."
He shook his head. He looked wiped out -- exhausted and sick, like he'd been
worked over again. Slowly, she took his hands in hers.
"I'm sorry, Chakotay."
"So am I. I'm sorry I couldn't forget. I'm sorry I made you sit through
that..."
"Don't apologize for that. Come here." She wrapped her arms around his neck,
pulling him into a tight embrace, their faces side by side. He was still tense
at first, but relaxed against her gradually, running his fingers through her
hair as if the repetitive motion comforted him. Periodically his muscles would
clench up and he would shudder, but he forced himself to calm.
There wasn't anything particularly romantic about the contact; still, she knew
they could not linger in the arboretum. Though neither of them was due on duty
for hours, they couldn't afford to be caught like this, in a public area of the
ship. She wondered if perhaps Tuvok was covering for them; he'd known something
was the matter between them, even if she never discussed exactly what was going
on between herself and the first officer with her chief of security and oldest
friend. He might have put the area on security lockout, but he couldn't do that
all night without some sort of explanation.
"Come back to my quarters?" she asked lightly, in a tone that could have
suggested a proposition or just the need to move. Chakotay nodded, using her
shoulder as leverage to rise before pulling her up beside him. When they
reached her rooms, she got him mint tea from the replicator, thinking of mint
as something cool and clean. They drank it in near-silence.
"Come to bed," he said when they had finished, and led her there, undressing
her while he kissed her gently over and over. But there was no real urgency,
and once he lay back he became almost entirely passive, though he insisted on
leaving the lights partway on so he could see her. She indulged him, offering
what measure of comfort she could, greatly relieved to be past the tension of
the past several days despite what it had obviously cost him to remember.
"I used to like to be touched there," he murmured as her hands moved on him.
"Before."
She knew what he was asking, and resisted her own moment of revulsion, stroking
quickly beneath his scrotum and into the cleft. The strength of his groan
surprised her. The next time she didn't completely remove her hand. Chakotay's
body was rigid with tension, eyes clenched shut, but he was also rock-hard, and
panting. Hesitantly she pressed a finger down, believing the resistance meant
that she was hurting him, but he whispered, "Don't stop." She moved to take him
into her mouth as she pushed harder, surprised that the dry, tight opening
wasn't causing him pain -- maybe it was, but maybe he wanted that, as some sort
of penance. When she began to move rhythmically back and forth, he cried out
loudly a few times, then bucked and arched with no more warning than the
powerful contraction she felt inside him, filling her mouth with hot, bitter
fluid. She let it spill over her hand, wiping it on the sheet. At first it was
difficult for him to meet her eyes afterwards, but once he realized nothing had
changed between them, he was relieved and grateful, wrapping himself around her
and satisfying her with his hands.
Afterwards, while she lay drowsing half on top of him with his arm circling
her, he asked, "You never answered me. What made you want to try...you know?"
"Curiosity. And...I've heard that men like it. I thought you'd think I was
being adventurous."
"Well, I did." His voice was low. "Not the way you were expecting. I'm sorry,
Kathryn."
"Stop saying that."
"I thought maybe someone in your past sometime had made you...you're so
skittish about doing certain things..."
"I've had a couple of bad experiences. Nothing like abuse. It doesn't take much
for something to become a real turn-off." She lifted her head to regard him.
"I've always felt safe with you. Even when I didn't think being with you like
this was safe at all, I never thought you would do anything that would hurt
me."
"Maybe we never know anyone well enough to know what's going to hurt them." She
realized with a pang of guilt that some part of her enjoyed seeing him this
vulnerable; even when he had been the one professing his love while she feigned
indifference, she had felt exposed.
"How do you feel now?"
He swallowed. "About Tayim...I think maybe I thought he wanted, you know, what
they made me do to him. Not like that, just...me. And I know I probably
wouldn't have done it, no matter how much he begged, if the Cardassians hadn't
made me...he knew that too. The one way I knew he didn't want it was the only
way I was ever going to. I hated him for that. And I hated myself for blaming
him. I wish...if there was some way I could go back and just do what he wanted,
and made the rest of it not happen. I would have. It's always going to be a
mess, isn't it."
"I think all you can do is acknowledge that, and try to go on from there."
He fell asleep with her still lying over him, his head falling back and his
lips parting as he relaxed for what seemed like the first time all week. She
watched his eyes flickering under the lids and wondered what dreams caused the
expressions that flitted across his face. "It's past now," she whispered as a
ghost of a smile passed his lips. Burying her face against his side, she closed
her eyes.
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