Interlude

A/N: I thought I had re-posted all my Voyager fics, but I'd forgotten about this one. I don't know what made me think of it today – possibly the fact that I'm struggling to hit my daily word count and need a bit of an interlude myself…

Janeway was seated at her desk in her ready room when the call came through. The ship's comm. system bleeped and a moment later Tuvok's voice spoke into the air.

"I'm receiving a transmission from the surface, Captain. Commander Chakotay is requesting to speak with you."

"Route it to my ready room console would you, Tuvok?"

A second later, Chakotay's face appeared on her screen. She glanced up at him with a smile and then immediately looked back to the PADD she held in her hand. On it was one of the reports from the pile she was still struggling to wade through. The past two weeks had been particularly busy for everyone aboard. Voyager had spent them in orbit of an unnamed, uninhabited planet that offered a plethora of opportunities both for scientific study and resupply. There was so much to examine that several parties of the crew had established temporary bases on each of the planet's landmasses, where they had spent every minute of the time scanning, cataloguing, mining and refining. Every observation, every request for additional equipment, every note about possible products of the planet's surface – all of these had come across Janeway's already cluttered desk for review, adding to the already heavy workload of the ship's daily business. Today, though, the teams on the surface were packing up, and so Chakotay had gone planetside – as he had, on and off over the course of their stay – to oversee their departure.

"Commander," she said. "How's everything going down there?"

"We're almost done," he said. "The last team is about to start the beam-back of their equipment now. Can you join me on the surface, Captain? There's something I think you should see."

She looked up from Ensign Kaplan's report on the deuterium deposits they had found. "Oh? Is there a problem?"

His face smiled at her from the screen. "No. Everything's fine. There's just something I want to show you."

Janeway put down the PADD with a frown. "If you think it's absolutely necessary?"

"I do."

"Very well, Commander. I'm on my way."

Janeway stood as his image vanished. Abandoning the pile of unread PADDS on her desk, she walked onto the bridge, ignoring the disapproving eyebrow Tuvok raised at her as she told him where she was going.

"It's the safest place we've visited in all the years we've been in this quadrant, and I'll only be gone a moment or two," she said. "Get Harry to keep a transporter lock on me if you really think there's a reason to worry."

"Aye, Captain," said the Vulcan, evidently resigned.

"Good. You have the bridge, Mr Tuvok."

When she reached the transporter room, Janeway was surprised to find it full of the last science team, busily removing their equipment from the transporter pad. They had evidently only just materialised – they were all still swathed in the thick weather-appropriate coats they had been issued with before their sojourn on the planet's briskly chilly surface.

"Ensign," she said, to the young man closest to her, "who's left on the surface?"

"Only Commander Chakotay, Captain," he replied, puffing slightly as he hefted another specimen case onto the pile already secured in his arms.

"Do you have another trip to make for remaining equipment?"

"No ma'am," managed the Ensign. "This is the last of it."

Janeway nodded him on his way before he could collapse beneath his load, and then wove through the rest of the team to the transporter pad. If the science teams thought they had exhausted the limits of their stay, what could Chakotay possibly want her down there for?

"When you're ready, Lieutenant," she said, to the woman on duty at the transporter controls. Collins, that was her name, wasn't it? The thought drifted away amid the familiar, grating tingle of the transporter beam.

She rematerialised on a small, dusty bluff rising high above a lake that shone turquoise blue with glacial meltwater. Aside from the regular holes that marked where the Voyager's temporary science structures had been pushed into the alien earth, there was no sign that anyone had ever been here at all. Janeway turned in her place, scanning for stray fixtures or a forgotten hypospanner, but to her satisfaction, there was nothing. This place would be left as unspoiled as they had found it, which was absolutely how it should be.

Her slow turn revealed Chakotay, standing at the north end of the flat patch of ground, looking out over the dense forest that stretched from the base of the bluff to the water's edge, below. In one hand he held one of the crew's cold-weather jackets, though he himself only wore his uniform. He had his back to her, but she could see the breath of his exhalations puffing into the air like smoke.

"Commander?" she said, walking towards him, feeling the icy bite of the chilly air seeping through her uniform.

He turned as she approached, his cheeks rosy from the cold, a smile lighting his dark eyes. "Captain."

"Well?" Janeway asked, coming to a stop beside him and rubbing her hands together against the cold. "What is it you want me to see?"

He nodded towards the water, or rather to the line of immense mountains that rose beyond the lake, layer upon layer of peaks that stretched on into a distance that exceeded the naked eye. "Just this."

She gazed out at the range of peaks and then back up at him with a perplexed frown. "The mountains? What about them? According to all the reports I've had we've already found every mineral they have to offer."

"It's not the mountains," he said.

"Not the mountains?" she repeated. "Well, what then? The lake? The forest? I thought Neelix had been rather thorough with his assessment of the foliage available to us. Perhaps you haven't read his report yet?"

"I've read his report," Chakotay laughed. "The view, Kathryn. I just wanted you to see the view."

She looked back out over everything before them, a slight flash of irritation sparking beneath her next words. "It's beautiful. I know it is, Chakotay – I've seen it before."

"No, you haven't," he corrected her mildly. "You've seen an image on a viewscreen. It's not the same. Look at it, Kathryn. Take a moment and just… look."

She turned away from him so that she stood just as he had been when she'd arrived. Her ears were beginning to burn with cold.

"Breathe in," Chakotay told her, quietly.

She did. The air was ice cold, tingling against her nose and throat as she pulled it into her lungs. It was clear - crystal, crystal clear, with the kind of purity Voyager's recyclers could never quite achieve.

"Breathe out," he told her then, just as quietly.

Her warm breath patterned the air as she exhaled.

"Good," he told her. "Now – just take a moment. And look."

The mountains were flushed with colour. White, glinting snow lay on their highest slopes, dappled a reflected gold from the winter sun as it waned low to the west. Jagged purple warred with vivid pink and orange as the granite that formed their bulk millennia before took on the tint of evening. Behind them the sky was burning, the pale azure blue of full day just giving way to the indigo of falling night that would soon allow the stars to prick their pins of light above the mountain range's rocky peaks.

They were vast and eternal, as was the feeling they inspired if only one were to just take a moment to really see them.

Janeway let out another slow breath.

"You see?"

She laughed, the sound shivering in the otherwise still and silent air. "Yes," she said. "I see. They don't look real, do they? How can something that looks so extraordinary be anything but a painting?"

Chakotay said nothing, but she didn't have to look at him to know he was smiling.

"You know, they actually do remind me of a painting – or a series of them," she added, keeping her voice low. "A painter from twentieth century Earth. His name was Nicholas Roerich. His images of mountains even inspired a book. A novel about aliens, actually. I read it in the first year of our journey. Seemed appropriate, at the time…"

"Oh?"

She glanced around to find him watching her, clearly curious. "Yes. It was called At The Mountains of Madness, by an author called H.P Lovecraft. This is how he imagined a vast range of mountains that could conceal the presence of alien life to look. Unreal, unearthly…"

"…maddening?"

She laughed again. "Apparently. Not quite what you were going for, I know, but there you are. I suppose it's what they thought the notion of such otherness would do to us, back then."

Chakotay quietly echoed her laughter. "A twentieth century dream of extraterrestrial life. What would he think if he knew how far into space the human race has travelled? What would he say, if he could see the things we have seen, rather than only imagine them?"

"I wonder," Janeway agreed.

"We are privileged, aren't we," he said, "to really see what others only dream about?"

She looked out at the mountains again, contemplating their immensity with a smile before turning to him and laying one hand on his arm. "Yes, we are. Thank you, for reminding me. Sometimes it's easy to forget how lucky we are. Sometimes it just seems…" she trailed off.

"… as if there is only madness out here, after all?" Chakotay suggested, gently. "I know how easy it is to get buried in the challenges of the day to day. I'm guilty of it myself. So many reports, so much to worry about. It's easy to spend every day looking down. Every now and then it pays to just stop and… look up. Because without this – without these moments, without this view – there's really no point to any of it. Is there?"

Janeway looked up at him, feeling a sudden wave of affection for this man, who always seemed to know exactly what she needed, even when she wasn't aware of it herself. She ran her hand up from where it rested on his arm until it reached his shoulder and only just managed to stop herself touching her fingers to his cold cheek.

"Sometimes," she said, her voice husking lightly in the cold air, "I forget just how wise you are, Commander." She dropped her arm and turned to look out at the view again, breathing in the peace and silence of the place. A moment later Chakotay moved, wrapping the coat he carried over her shoulders and rubbing his hands down her arms, his fingers brushing over the backs of her hands lightly, just for a second.

"Take a moment. In fact, take a few," he told her, quietly, as he stepped away. "I'll be on standby myself to beam you back up."

She was on the verge of saying no, that there was too much to do and she really should get on with it. But in the second it took her to hesitate, Chakotay had already dematerialised. Janeway looked around at the huge emptiness of her surroundings, at the boundless size and beauty of the world around her.

She shut her eyes and tipped back her head. She opened her eyes and looked.

She breathed in.

[END]