AUTHOR: Sally
SUMMARY: A camping trip
RATING: PG13
DISCLAIMER: Star Trek Voyager and the characters portrayed here belong to Paramount. Not me… shame!
“And I thought you knew where you were going, Kathryn,” he complained as she continued to study the map.
“I did,” she protested. “But you wanted to do this the old-fashioned way.” She let go of the map with one hand and waved it at him with the other. “It’s not my fault you dropped the compass.”
He sighed. Hiking with Kathryn had sounded a grand idea until this had happened. Last night he had slept under the stars for the first time in years. Actually under as opposed to being surrounded by them in a starship. “I don’t know why we’re even doing this,” he muttered.
“What was that, Chakotay?” she asked sweetly.
“Nothing, Kathryn,” he groaned. “It’s just that…” He strode a few steps ahead and then sat down on a large, flat-topped stone.
She gave up all pretense with the map, folding it haphazardly and placing it back in her pack. “What, Chakotay? Just what is it? Because I’m not sure I can take much more of this.”
He looked up at her and immediately had flashbacks to when they were on Voyager’s bridge. Or worse still, her ready room. His friend was about to enter full Captain mode. He sighed. Might as well die with volume than in complete silence. “I just find it hard to believe that I’m here in a field, lost, with a woman who once claimed that she hated anything concerning roughing it.”
“A woman can change, can’t she?” she retorted, hands now placed on hips. “And its not like I haven’t ‘roughed it’ as you call it, in the time we’ve known each other.”
He laughed. “Kathryn, the crew gave us supplies, a replicator, a shelter. I would hardly call that ‘roughing it.’”
“What about that godawful planet Seska and her little friends abandoned us on, then?”
He lowered his head. “Do you need to throw Seska’s name in each time? And okay, I’ll grant you there was that one time. But then all you needed were decent leadership skills. You had one hundred and forty eight people to discover the lay of the land.”
She came closer to him and leaned in. “At least I didn’t have the one duty of starting a fire and failing at it.”
He jerked his head up. “I got one started.”
“With some help,” she snarled.
Having finally had enough, he stood up and faced her. “Now you listen here, Kathryn Janeway. There are some things I can do without your help.”
“Oh yeah?” She pulled the map back out and attempted to throw it at him. “Well, get us out of this one, mister!”
It was at that precise moment that the rain chose to make its entrance. Within seconds, both of them were soaked, their hair sticking to the sides of their faces.
He threw back his head and laughed. “Oh wonderful,” he groaned, holding out his hand as if to catch some of the drops.
Thankfully, she began to see the funny side as well. “Oh, Chakotay,” she gasped. “How do we get ourselves into these situations?”
“We?” he asked. “I’ve just been following your orders for the past goodness knows how many years.” He turned away slightly. “Looks like we’ve just been presented with another option.”
“What one’s that?”
“Well,” he began. “We can either decide which fork is the right one to take or we can just set up camp for the night and hope inspiration will come to us in the morning.”
She gazed in the direction he was facing. The cause of their argument was ahead of them. A division in the bridleway they had been on. Both forks led in different directions. The question was which one should they take since their map reading skills had apparently failed them both.
But was the other option facing them any better than picking a route that had only a fifty per cent chance of getting them where they wanted to be? It was raining. This meant that he couldn’t sleep in the open as he had done last night. This meant that he would have to sleep in the two-man tent, along with her.
“Well?” he asked.
Practicality took over from her personal problems with the scenario. “We camp,” she said firmly. “It won’t do us any good to get any wetter.”
He grinned at her. “Okay then,” he said, far too easily for her liking. “Camp it is.” He pulled his own pack off his back and swung it in front of him. “Find us a level spot, will you, and I’ll get the tent up.”
Twenty minutes later they found themselves huddled in their shelter.
“You’re shivering,” Chakotay said, somewhat unnecessarily.
She glared at him. “Well, thank you very much, mister-know-it-all, for that wonderful observation.”
He ignored it and pulled her pack to him. “You need to change,” he muttered.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“You take one item of clothing off and put another one on.” He lifted his head at her and grinned briefly before returning to the contents of her pack. “You must have an extra sweater or something somewhere in here.”
“I don’t.” It was said so quietly he almost didn’t hear her.
“What?”
She screwed up her face at him. “Well, I wore the one yesterday and I had the one for today and that was it.”
“That was it?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she groaned. “We were only meant to do one night. I didn’t plan on us getting lost like this.”
“You didn’t bring spare?” He shook his head. “You packed for just the one night?” Realisation dawned. “Don’t tell me, no extra rations either.”
His worst fears were confirmed. “The last of the coffee was in the flask that got broken.”
So he was now faced with his former captain soaking wet, with no change of clothing, and completely out of coffee. There was only one thing left to do.
Fortunately he decided that killing himself would not help the matter at hand. “Kathryn,” he began sternly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
She looked up at him, chin now resting on her knees, legs pulled up tight in front of her. “What?”
“Starfleet survival training, I’m afraid.” He began to pull his own top off. “Come on, woman, under the covers, now.” He pulled back the sleeping bag for her.
She crawled in obligingly and he followed her. “Are you always this demanding in bed?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he taunted.
To his surprise she huddled closer to him. “Perhaps,” she whispered.
His arms grew tight around her. Gently he placed a kiss upon her head. Feeling brave, he whispered back, “Then perhaps I’ll show you sometime.”
She twisted in his arms so that her eyes looked into his. “When?”
“How about now?”
Her answer was evident in the way that she leaned closer and kissed him.
The sun was high in the sky when Chakotay opened up the tent the following morning. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, the clouds had cleared and he could now see the open land spread before him. He took a deep breath, turned back inside and smiled.
She was still asleep. He couldn’t blame her. It had been one hell of a night. One in which she had told him all he needed to know. She did love him.
Deciding to let her sleep for a short while longer, he began the task of sorting out their clothing, seeing what was dry and what was not. Eventually, his hands found the way to the bottom of her pack and connected with something metal.
It was something that had a familiar shape to it. Pulling it out he exclaimed sharply at his discovery.
“Huh?” she asked, still half asleep.
“This,” he said, crawling over to her and shaking her by the shoulder.
She opened an eye. “’S a tricorder,” she muttered.
“I know damn well what it is, Kathryn. The question is, why do you have it?”
“Thought it might come in useful.” She sat up slowly and shook her hair out of her face.
“Then why didn’t you mention it last night?” he asked.
“Didn’t want to,” she replied calmly.
The wheels of his brain slowly clicked and whirred until he knew for certain what she was saying. “You planned this?” he asked, incredulous.
“Well, not the rain,” she muttered, taking the instrument from him. “Couldn’t plan that.” She slid out of the sleeping bag and crawled to the door of the tent, leaving him with a marvelous view of her behind. He lost sight of her head as she peered out of their quarters. Finally she muttered, “That way,” and faced him again.
“Well?” he asked.
“Coffee’s that direction,” she said, indicating roughly with her thumb. “And so’s a decent bed for us to sleep in.”
His jaw dropped. “Sleep?” he asked.
“Okay, so maybe not sleep, though we probably should at some point. You’ve managed to exhaust me on this little excursion.” She grinned and he managed to smile back.
In less than an hour, perhaps spurred on, they had packed up their belongings and set out on the path the tricorder laid out for them. As they continued down the track, Chakotay couldn’t help but let his eye wander off in the direction of the other path. How close they could have come to taking the wrong one, he reflected. But now they were definitely on the right track, not just out here but in their personal lives as well.
FINIS