As it turned out, Sara bounced back faster than a hoverball slapped against a wall. Nearly two hours after waking she was fully awake and sitting up, and four hours later was able to keep down a light meal, after which the doctor released her.
She would have possible dizziness and some residual affects, she had been treated for the buildup of lactic acid in her system, as well as her ‘original condition’, as everyone had taken to calling it. Sara was placed on medical leave for two days and ordered to rest, stay quiet, and eat a solid meal three times a day, with none of Neelix’s food until examined by the doctor again.
Thank god for replicator rations, she thought.
The doctor didn’t notify Chakotay because he quite simply didn’t have time. Medically he was still monitoring Tuvok’s trainees, and he had to finish the cataloguing of various details that had escaped him in the past few days. Half of him wanted to believe that he had forgotten, but as a hologram he didn’t have that excuse. So it was with little humor that he took the verbal lashing for it and watched the crimson-and-black suited back leave his sickbay in search of the girl.
Chakotay found her on the holodeck, which wasn’t a big surprise, she hadn’t had much time to use it since they came to the ship, not with his incessant demands that he placed on her to do nothing other than follow the orders of others and stay out of the way, not to mention B’Elanna’s insistence of crawling through mile after mile of Jefferies tubes.
If he had felt like lying, at least to himself, he would have said that it had been for her own good, to keep her out of trouble, to keep her busy and maybe forget the fact that they were 75 plus years from home. But then again, Sara was halfway like Tom Paris, who had more on the ship than she ever could back on Earth.
Chakotay cared. Truly, he did care, more than he ever wanted to admit – his heart had frozen at the sight of her laying helplessly on the deck, legally dead for all intents and purposes. If it hadn’t happened he wondered how long she would have stood the stress and day-to-day living aboard Voyager the way things had been going. Certainly not for much longer, but Kes and the doctor had been right about her – she was different. Different enough maybe to be able to withstand more than the normal teenager.
Or maybe not.
The program was inviting, the time known as autumn in a semi-northern climate on Earth, the air crisp, clean and cool, the trees turning their brilliantine colors of red, orange, yellow and even in some cases purple. The sky was rather clouded, hazy and sunny at the same time, the sun having changed its line of execution to the earth and crossed the median that gave it its distinctive winter angle. A slight breeze carrying the scent of pine and smoke, tinged with a touch of frost, drifted through his nostrils, scuttering the foliage across the hard-packed sand.
He found her by the small pond incorporated into the setting, shallow and not all that large, large enough to be a suitable body of water but having no waves, the shoreline visible from all angles, at the far end surrounded by maple trees turning an exquisite shade of plum, occasional branches of weeping willows now yellow dipping into the waterline to disappear. She wandered the edges, dressed in uniform. Perhaps the most interesting thing to Chakotay was her hair – it was down.
He’d never seen her with her hair down before.
At full length, it hung nearly past her waist, the thick dark-brown strands not quite that color in sunlight or a certain kind of artificial bright light, instead turning to a fiery copper-auburn with a reddish tinge, and here and there a strand of gold running through it. She had drawn the sides and front back with two clips that were on top of her head. The rest, in curly waves and ripples, slipped to rest against her sides, parting of its own accord.
She didn’t move as he walked beside her, crouched as she was on the bank, the place where the ripples of water stirred with the air to softly lap against the ground. He assumed the same position, squatting down on his heels, carefully eyeing her face, her demeanor, her expression.
“How are you?” he asked by way of greeting, his eyebrows crinkling in curiousity.
Sara nodded wordlessly, chewing on her lip. “I died, didn’t I.”
It was a statement of fact, not a question. “Yes,” Chakotay was quiet. “But the EMH didn’t have much trouble bringing you back. What do you remember?”
“Nothing, really.” He suspected that was a lie, the way she shrugged, but chose not to call her on it. “Nothing worth talking about.”
“If you do…”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Sara assured him tiredly, rising to her feet, looking down at the leaves that her boots scuffed up.
It wasn’t just the wind that caused him to shiver.
Sara looked at him fully, emotions flickering through her usually passive crystalline azure-blue eyes, before they returned to their blank state. Sadness replaced by anger, to be replaced by slight bewilderment, before she looked away.
“Did you have a headache?” Chakotay asked quietly, hands on his hips. A usual posture for him.
“Kind of.” Sara answered thoughtfully, staring out over the water. “Why?”
“Your hair’s down.” He had a fleeting urge to run his hand over it.
If Sara felt the emotion from him she didn’t betray it. In fact she said nothing, focusing on the area around her, looking at it with a scrutiny that made Chakotay wonder if she wasn’t planning to add more details.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he finally asked, almost in a whisper, resting his large hand at the back of her neck, not pressing, not squeezing, simply resting there. “Tell me what I can do.”
In reality Chakotay knew what was wrong, had known before he asked, much as Sara knew herself but would not speak of it. Too much hatred, too much ignorance from practically everyone including him, not enough companionship or recreation time, no outlet for her emotional needs whatsoever.
“Ever hear any fairy tales?” Sara was quiet.
“Some,” he wondered where she was going with this line of conversation.
“Cinderella.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just like Cinderella,” she looked out over the water. “But no work.”
He reached out and ruffled her hair, stroking it gently. It was an action of instinct more than anyone else, to reach out to someone that was hurting, to try and offer some measure of comfort.
It surprised him even more that she allowed him to do it.
Chakotay tapped his comm badge and ordered a discreet site-to-site transport, one that he erased the logs for. He didn’t need anyone running to find out if there was something wrong, with either him or her. They landed in her quarters, where he was careful to wash her reddened face with a cold cloth. He took the chance and replicated her some sleepwear that was quite modest, not that she’d had any say in it. Pink fuzzy one-piece sleeper suit, complete with attached footies, that zipped up the front in one long shot from ankles to neck and had a pink-and-white striped collar and cuffs.
“I don’t expect you to be grateful every minute of every day that I took you in,” he finally, quietly told her the words he’d been wanting to since Tom Paris had come to him. He put the sleeper in her hands. “And I expect you to speak up when something’s bothering you. Will you be all right in these?”
Judging by the look on her face, Sara didn’t care what she slept in. Yet with her hair freshly braided into its twin plaits that dangled down her back, clad in the apparel of pink fuzz, Chakotay had to admit she looked adorable. If it weren’t for the limp way she moved and the listless look on her face, given her size he would have imagined a nine-or-ten year old girl heading off to bed after a day of school and play.
Her braids swung out to the sides as he lifted her into bed and put her in the middle. Studying her for a brief moment, deciding something was missing, he went to the replicator and dialed up a standard teddy bear, making it a bit larger than most he’d seen, but that was beside the point. Turning back, he handed it to Sara and watched as she regarded it curiously, turning the furred creature, studying it, running her hands over the soft nose and with a flickering smile tucking it within her arm as she turned over on her side.
Chakotay drew the covers over and ordered the lights to ¼ illumination. Soft and delicate, quiet light he liked to think of it, suitable for good sleep and thinking.
He sat with her, on the edge of the bed, stroking her hand in his own, rubbing the thumb over her small knuckles. “We’ll talk later,” he told her quietly, watching as her lids fluttered, drooping more and more until finally they didn’t rise again. Her breathing became soft and even. On his way out, he cancelled the reset for her wake-up call.
His next chore was to rearrange the duty schedule.
