Dance with my father
new short story by
vanhunks
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Voyager owns Janeway and Chakotay.
Author's Note: The theme for this story was inspired some time ago on VAMB in a forum for story ideas. I had been mulling about this story since the Steamy Secret Summer project and had to wait as work got quite in the way of things. The idea was to use the song title and allow it to inspire a fic.
SUMMARY: Yet another coda on CODA for me. This time, their time spent on Lake George does not bring Kathryn the peace she craves.
DANCE WITH MY FATHER
Conversation had dried up. Small talk punctuated by cross interruptions of each other's sentences, absurd predictions of our texts, quietly petered out until only the silence remained, the disquiet lingering in the cocoon in which we've swathed ourselves.
And the moonlight.
Long, elegant streaks of illumination that formed avenues across the smooth, tranquil water of Lake George. We could sail along these avenues and make directly for the shore, or admire their beauty which seemed to flow from the very silence that embraced two lonely figures in a boat. The oars sculled with quiet efficiency, their spatulas cleaving water with soundless ease.
Did I want this silence? Did Kathryn want this silence into which we've fallen unbidden? Her face was turned away from me, from reality, from truth, perhaps. Her profile was aloof, pained too, and I was struck by the certainty that Kathryn was unaware of her raw appearance, of how close to the surface the horror of her experience still lay.
We spoke in fragmented sentences about peace roses, her hand twirling the stem with nervous energy as the words issued from her. At first they were even, full of life, perhaps even joyful as only the thought that she was alive could bring to her such emotion. I promised I'd set up a special tank in the hydroponics bay for the cultivation of roses. She sounded happy in agreeing, light in her eyes ever supporting my notion of a floral bay. Tentative agreements on an interdepartmental work exchange programme, the search for the perfect man or woman who could run the hydroponics bay, mention of the simulated weather conditions of our current holoprogramme… Inanities, really. I admired Lake George, the moonlight, responding with a modest air my own ability to take up the oars and row while she sat facing me, one hand in her lap, the other holding the rose. If she wore a wide brimmed hat, the dress of light blue with soft patterned flowers, if it were daylight with the sun kissing the brim of her hat, lazily teasing her cheeks, I'd have thought she was the doomed Elvira Madigan with Sixten sitting opposite her.
Not that I minded the silence. Yet, the way it descended to this point, the unspoken between us, never voiced for fear of that which were too dreaded to recall drove into this stillness – like a silent cat.
I knew all was not well. Kathryn died. Or almost died. Therefore, I died. Or almost died. That which remained unspoken between us hovered like a beast that lay in wait for its prey, a patient beast whose heartbeat, like a steady metronome measured the moment it would pounce.
"Tell me about him," I asked, piercing her remoteness.
My voice must have sounded to her like the crack of a whip, snapping at the stillness with ruthless insolence. She turned to face me, a sharp, jerky movement. She looked momentarily distracted, as if my words disturbed a particular train of thought, or an unwanted memory.
“Who?” she asked, twirling the rose with fierceness.
“Your father.”
I waited, wondering if Kathryn would delete the programme and hoping that she wouldn’t. I was treading on the dreaded beast in the silence. Yet I knew that her father was the key to her present melancholy, part of why the trauma of what she experienced still echoed, still reverberated through her being.
“I never – “
“Please… Down there…”
Finally it was out. The tightness of my chest, swollen hard from the growing intensity of the beast, subsided slightly, the resulting release of tension almost too much to bear. My sigh of relief went unnoticed. The dreaded planet was always down there, as if it deserved anonymity. That way Kathryn could pretend that whatever she experienced in her death-like state, was a figment, that it never happened.
Kathryn looked away again, her movement again as jerky, erratic as before. Then she remained gazing over the water and I imagined her eyes following the long, gleaming golden avenue towards the shore. I didn't speak again, the urge to inflict pain on myself intense. I didn't wish to see her hurt, not again, not ever. Especially when she couldn't conceal her terror. Or a deep, deep sorrow no one would ever know, except Kathryn.
So minutes passed in which I sculled in silence and Kathryn brooded over the waters.
Then she looked at me, the moonlight in its rare beauty cruelly exposing her pain.
"The – the…alien…appeared as my father…" she said quietly, her statement, the coolness of it despite the slight stammer, an attempt to play down the impact of what happened to her. I don't know what happened in Kathryn's altered state. I was only a witness to the real world of Kathryn, that world in which, for a few harrowing minutes, she had been lost to Voyager, to us, to me.
The raw countenance was testimony to that suffering.
"Your father was a good man," I replied.
The long stem snapped and the rose fell over the side, drifting on the calm water of Lake George. Kathryn's face was beginning to lose some of its remoteness, but she still looked pale to me.
"Yes…"
"The alien used his image, a man of goodness, projected for his own evil ends," I voiced my thoughts, my heart thudding as the thread of hope, long and thin and so delicate, strengthened a little.
"My father was often away, on long missions…"
"But he remembered important days for you."
Kathryn smiled, a wan, yet tender smile as her gaze followed the golden moonlight again where it streaked the water's surface.
"He came to watch me dance… the ballet… I think I told you – "
"You did. It made you happy, of course."
"It was very important. Every child in my class… It's natural to want your parents there to see you achieve something, or when you perform…especially when you're little."
"The alien disturbed that vision you had of him," I told her, the realisation dawning of a life-form who invaded Kathryn's conscious, her deepest and most private feelings and memories, reading her, wooing her away from life using her father's image to his own ends. I recall…she had mentioned 'my father' and 'alien' in the same breath. There was a connection, one which made Kathryn the way she was now – reflective, sad, very, very sad… And one which made me seek to dispel her gloom.
Kathryn nodded.
"But there's more, isn't there, Kathryn?" I ventured.
I closed my eyes for a brief second.
"Yes…" she responded softly, hardly above a whisper.
When I looked at her again, it was to see a tear roll down her cheek. I leaned forward and touched the dampness. I felt her sigh under my fingers, her warm breath tingling my skin.
I whispered, for by this time everything experienced, every emotion, turn of the head, even random movement or thought was cloaked in the air of softness, a kind of hallowed ambience preparing for some extraordinary revelation. "The leaving…of this realm…is hard. It leaves those left behind with a sense of the incomplete," I told her, remembering my own father in a quest, remembering that once I could finally see him, talk with him, I felt the old regrets that had eaten my soul away, leave quietly. I watched Kathryn closely for any reaction, any response to my words.
"I didn't want to die, you know?" There was a touch of finality to her voice.
"I know. You clung to life and defeated the alien."
"When I was twelve…on my birthday…" she started, veering sharply away from my words, "my father rushed from deep space to be home. It was very late and I had already gone to bed. I had cried myself to sleep because he didn't make it…"
"I guess he made time to be with you and your sister," I said. Then, "He kissed you awake?"
A sad, sad smile again. And once again the avenue of light across the calm water of Lake George held a deep, unknown fascination for Kathryn. So I continued my waiting, not caring that the oars felt heavier, the pull more laboured although the strokes remained even, the sculling as efficient as it had been when we first set out in the boat. I could imagine Edward Janeway breaking rules just to be with his daughter on her birthday. I felt a twelve year old girl's loneliness, disappointment, her sadness that her father couldn't be with her.
I knew that he had died at Tau Ceti Prime. Kathryn had once, on New Earth, spoken about him, about her fiancé Justin who also died there. Her relating of the event then had been with flinty realism, an account of his death as if it had been an impersonal communiqué about everyday business. Afterwards Kathryn had calmly lapsed into the day to day survival. Her reaction had been most likely the way she had drilled herself over the years to put tragedy behind her and take a road forward where she needed no reminders of personal pain.
Now an alien who sought to conquer her spirit had made her revisit realms best left where they were mostly either good or unpleasant memories. It was clear that Kathryn was struggling. I breathed a sigh of relief when she faced me eventually.
"I was glad he came, Chakotay. Really happy, even though it was almost past the last hour of my birthday. He brought me a gift. A glass figure of a bird. Goldenbird. It felt too delicate to hold. Too delicate."
"You still have your goldenbird," I said.
She nodded. A long pause, heavy with the fullness of hope. A smile that transformed the melancholy into animation, wondrous animation. "Then he asked me to dance with him."
Her words didn't surprise me, though they were voiced with painful precision, like that time on New Earth, trying, I guess, to invoke or enforce the flinty realism again. But it was impossible to keep the emotion out of her voice. The last word came on a short, breathless trembling. Another tear rolled down her cheek.
"It sounds like it was a beautiful moment."
Kathryn smiled, leaned forward slightly. A new, sudden energy returned, though the sadness cloaked every word she uttered.
"In my long nightie – the remnants of spring still carried a nip in the air – he lifted me to place my bare feet on his boots. My small feet on his great feet. We – we moved about the room. No music played but I could feel music in my heart and the rhythm that took us about the small space next to my bed. But we danced that night, our feet carrying us out of the room along the passage to the lounge. At the front door he paused and I nodded, wanting the moment to last forever, wanting the excitement of following wherever he led me. On the porch I held fast onto him. He never once let me stumble. Never. I've never forgotten it…"
"That's the best memory to have…the best."
Kathryn was quiet again. I took the aperture in the silence to speak.
"I understand what the alien did to you, Kathryn." I knew that she understood what I understood.
"I miss him…miss him…" she responded with aching vehemence, her hands jerking together on her lap, the rose long forgotten, its petals drifting about us in the water.
I drew in the oars, rested them along the boat, never taking my eyes off Kathryn. I leaned forward and pulled her shuddering, fragile frame closer to me. She didn't hurl herself against me in the distress of the profoundly wounded. She lay her head against my chest quietly, softly, as if the action was merely the extension of her movement and thought, as if, God help me for thinking it, I were the father she missed with her very breath in those moments. Kathryn didn't weep the tears of the damned or distraught daughter left behind. She didn't weep. She simply shuddered against me as if she was cold. I brushed my lips against her hair and closed my eyes. For the tears Kathryn didn't weep fell from my mine and rolled down my cheeks.
Later, when she was calm again, a little more centered but still with the aching hollowness of her heart showing in her eyes, she graced me with a gentle tug of her mouth corners.
"I saw you…"
"Down there?" I asked, sensing her truth.
"You wept for me."
"I despaired of losing you, Kathryn."
"Like I did my father. I – "
"Just miss him right now."
"We danced like that every year on my birthday, even when I complained I became too heavy. He just moved with me across the room…"
It hit me. Like the forceful bolt of lightning scorching me to death it hit me.
"Kathryn...?"
"That year when he died… We never got to dance…"
Her face paled in the moonlight, her alabaster skin growing into translucence before it filled with the intensity of longing. I held her to me again and thought how one's life could be incomplete. Such was the feelings Kathryn experienced. Dancing with her father, a special and private occasion for them, a tradition upheld long after her childish feet and body had matured into that of a woman – a beautiful golden bird – was what Kathryn missed.
I ended the holodeck programme quietly and in silence I accompanied Kathryn Janeway to her quarters. At her door she turned to me, a grateful look in her eyes. I touched her shoulder, a reassuring squeeze before saying 'Goodnight, Kathryn'. Long after the doors closed behind her, I stood there. Then I left for my own cabin, unable to shake off the image of Kathryn and her father dancing.
Did I fall asleep? I must have dozed off, my thoughts filled with Kathryn, her pained revelation, how her life seemed to have stalled when her father died so tragically, how there were spaces in our lives that up until certain things triggered them, we never knew were there. I thought how Kathryn's subconscious felt the absences, the sense of the incomplete. I had had those feelings myself. Only when I saw my father in a vision quest for the first time, I felt I had come full circle in my relationship with him.
Kathryn had not been spared that when the alien rocked her off kilter. She had 'seen' her father and was reminded that he owed her his last dance.
Was I asleep or merely waiting for a sound to come through the bulkheads? Sounds of Kathryn's restless twisting and turning in bed?
Maybe I was waiting for something. Whatever it was, or that I imagined, made me sit up finally. Minutes later, fully dressed, I stood outside her quarters. There was a low sound, perhaps of something falling, or a sob. Every known protective urge that my body housed screamed for release. My whole being was now, more than ever, attuned to her and so, without her permission, I accessed her codes and entered her darkened quarters.
Yes, Kathryn was restless in her sleep. She was murmuring softly, thrashing about as if she were fighting off something or someone.
I knelt next to her bed and took her hand in mine. The thrashing stopped, the hard wheezing turned to normal breathing. I rubbed the back of her hand, whispering her name softly, hoping that my voice would penetrate her dream.
Her eyes flew wide open. Eyes in which hope raged like a torrent. My heart sank, for I knew…
"Daddy?"
"No, it's me, Kathryn. Chakotay."
She lay on her side and kept staring at me. Her cheeks were stained, damp. Her lips were slightly parted. Who was I to her now that I corrected her dream? Chakotay or still her later father who was a good man and with whom she had had such a special relationship?
Around us the silence hovered, tainted only by the low thrumming sound of the ship's engines, by other imagined sounds that were, I realised, in my head. Silence. Arrested in time, moments in which the path to what would happen next was clear, although no words were spoken. No speculation, no predetermined talk that might blight the eventual act.
Voyager, its crew, its journey towards home, the knowledge that many adventures still awaited us – all seemed to retreat, remaining far away like a blurry mirage in the distance.
No words spoken. Yet my action was the result of an intuitive answer to an implicit question. Even as I thought of my actions, my hands were carrying them out. I pulled Kathryn gently up from the bed. She wore a long nightie, a creamy silk garment that clung to her, though she remained completely unconscious of her allure. Her hair fanned out in long, long tresses that reminded me of our time on New Earth. Her eyes – God, they were filled with absolute trust.
Banking down the deep emotion that threatened to derail me, I pulled her closer, lifted her so that her bare feet rested on mine. My arm encircled her waist, while I pressed her head close to me with my free hand. I couldn't resist the urge to press my lips against her hair.
The command for the computer to initiate an old earth song was given softly, understated. I felt Kathryn give a great, great sigh as she pressed closer to me and we began moving. She felt light, like a wraith, weightless as I swayed to the gentle melody, the sound of it filling my soul, filling Kathryn's being. Her face remained buried against me. I could dance like this with her forever, hold her to me like the precious, precious beautiful woman she was and allow the terror of her lying dead in my arms to seep from me, to give me too, a sense of peace. The words drifted to me. Intensely personal, they evoked the old regrets yet lingered sweetly enough to pierce Kathryn's wounded heart and nourish her with peace too. I was sure of that. She gave another little soft sigh and clung tighter to me.
If I could get another chance
Another walk, another dance with him
I’d play a song that would never, ever end
How I’d love, love, love to dance with my father again
How long was it before I realised that Kathryn was no longer the Captain of Voyager as we danced, rocking gently to the lilting music? How long was it before I realised that she was no longer even Kathryn the woman? The musical cadence, the haunting, nostalgic quality of the melody, every word that echoed round the room took Kathryn back…back…back to the porch of her Indiana home, to a young child whose feet perched with total trust, total devotion, total awe on those of her father. This was not a woman who clung to me. It was a child who for years subconsciously yearned to be in her father's arms, a woman who most likely never voiced regrets, or spoke in wistful tones of a father who died shortly before her birthday. A man who most likely promised to dance with her again.
I held Kathryn to me like a man, drowning in the understanding of the moment. I held her like I could never let her go again. My hand trembling in the glorious golden hair, I held her like I did down there, where for those interminable seconds Kathryn lay dead in my arms. Her feet were warm, dainty, small and when the music stopped finally, Kathryn moaned in the way a child would who didn't want something memorable to end.
"Hey…" I murmured softly against her hair.
"Hmmm?" came her sleepy response.
"You're falling asleep." Did she feel my smile? I wondered. She must have.
"I know it's you, Chakotay…"
Her voice sounded dreamy, a husky, low tone to it. I walked slowly back with her, to her room, to her bed. When she stepped on the floor, she grew small again, small and so fragile. She settled into bed. I pulled the cover to her chin. One palm cupped her cheek in a searing, precious child-like gesture. Her other hand was held in mine in She gazed at me with tired, grateful eyes. Lake George seemed an eternity away; the long streaks of moonlight that formed elongated avenues over the golden waters even farther away. I swore I'd give her another peace rose soon. Tomorrow soon.
Much like a dream it was – what happened down there, what happened on Lake George and what happened when we danced. Perhaps a dream. One thing I knew for certain. I almost lost Kathryn. I would walk through fire if I thought I'd lose her again. We were still at the beginning of our journey home and along the way many such terrifying things as happened with Kathryn might befall us. If it happened with Kathryn, I swear I would never leave her side. To her I was the father with whom she danced a last dance, while I helped, as I could see the dove of peace dawning on her and softening her features to restfulness, to give Kathryn the completion she yearned for subconsciously. To me I was the man who tried beyond his own strength not to think of her as anything more than my captain, my close friend and ally, my confidant.
For now at least.
"Chakotay…?" came a sleepy murmur from her.
"Yes?"
"Thank you…"
**********
END
Dance with my father - sung by Luther Vandross
Back when I was a
child
Before life removed all the innocence
My father would lift me high
And dance with my mother and me and then
Spin me around till I fell asleep
Then up the stairs he would carry me
And I knew for sure
I was loved
If I could get another chance
Another walk, another dance with him
I’d play a song that would never, ever end
How I’d love, love, love to dance with my father again
Ooh, ooh
When I and my mother would disagree
To get my way I would run from her to him
He’d make me laugh just to comfort me, yeah, yeah
Then finally make me do just what my mama said
Later that night when I was asleep
He left a dollar under my sheet
Never dreamed that he
Would be gone from me
If I could steal one final glance
One final step, one final dance with him
I’d play a song that would never, ever end
‘Cause I’d love, love, love to dance with my father again
Sometimes I’d listen outside her door
And I’d hear her, mama cryin’ for him
I pray for her even more than me
I pray for her even more than me
I know I’m prayin’ for much too much
But could You send back the only man she loved
I know You don’t do it usually
But Lord, she’s dyin’ to dance with my father again
Every night I fall asleep
And this is all I ever dream
*