Despite the Doctor's assurances that Tom was out of physical danger and would awake without difficulty now that his body had been shocked into self-repair, Chakotay's intention to greet that awakening became a long, lonely vigil that lasted throughout the night and most of the next morning.

Lonely because no other crewmember could be allowed to see that Tom's injuries were minor until such time as it was determined that he could be allowed to 'recover'. In the meantime, the stasis pod next to Tuvok's remained open and primed for his body.

Several times he was forced to leave Sickbay and speak with members of the crew who had been left shocked and bewildered by the 'accident' in the cargo bay. It was his duty as First Officer to be stalwart proof against their grief and confusion. Where the Maquis crewmembers were concerned, it was his duty as their friend also. The guilt of his own involvement in Janeway's necessary but ruthless plan lay heavy on his heart, but not so much that he couldn't perform the role of comforter to those bereaved by the death of the mutineers. 

He *was* genuinely sorrowed by the loss of life. He sincerely regretted the captain's decision to take such a drastic action as to murder the FIA operatives. Yet, that didn't mean he believed her decision had been *wrong*. Weighed against the lives of the whole crew, and even possibly the billions of lives that currently hung in the balance in the Alpha Quadrant, the dozen victims of the Captain's plot were sad but necessary sacrifices towards a greater good.

Chakotay believed that. Had he not, he wouldn't have supported her actions. As much as he adhered to the command structure of Starfleet, he'd never had any time for people who knowingly did wrong but then attempted to excuse themselves as having 'only followed orders'.

So he could live with the guilt of those deaths. He could share in the sorrow of the bereaved without feeling like a hypocrite. He *did* feel grief, but it was the grief of a man who nevertheless had no doubt that what had been done had been cruel but necessary.

Where his self-assurance broke down wasn't over the crew who had died. It was over the two who had survived.

Tuvok. The instigator of the would-be mutiny. A man so without scruples or compassion that even his fellow Vulcans spoke his name with shame. Admiral Paris' trusted confidant. Infiltrator and betrayer of the Maquis. A thousand deaths were too good for Tuvok and yet, instead of his body lying with the other retrieved corpses for 'decent' burial, he was still alive.

In a stasis chamber, admittedly, and unlikely to ever be released except into the hands of an SCC court to answer for his crimes, but alive regardless.

And, as much as he told himself that his rage towards the Vulcan was inspired only by the certain knowledge of how many Maquis had lost their lives in the torture chambers of the Cardassians because of Tuvok's duplicity, there was no escaping the knowledge that his anger had a far more personal source.

Tom's words, heard through the thin wall of a bathroom door, had seared themselves into Chakotay's soul. "I hate the way he calls me a whore, even though he *knows* why I'm what I am. He *knows* what the FIA did to me, it was *his* fucking...sorry...it was his idea and he makes use of it, but he still despises me. It's not fair."

What Tom was, Tuvok had made him so.

It was impossible to hold onto his hatred of Tom with that understanding. He had been hating the weapon, instead of laying blame where it truly belonged; in the hands of the men who had *created* the weapon. Tom's mouth had told Tuvok's lies. Tom's body had been whored for Tuvok's schemes. 

It wasn't Tom who'd broken Chakotay's heart.

It was Tuvok.

Tuvok who was, himself, just the vicious right hand of Tom's own father.

And now Tom was lying in Sickbay, the only other survivor of the massacre, and his continued survival depended upon Chakotay's own capacity for deceit. To keep Tom alive, Chakotay would have to take the same role of deceiver that Tom had played against *him* so brutally and well. 

A few days previously, Chakotay might have relished the role. He might have taken delight in deliberately shattering Tom's heart in vengeance for his own pain. He would have believed that Tom deserved it. But that had been before he'd overheard the conversation between Tom and the Captain that had forever destroyed Chakotay's desire for revenge.

Tom was innocent.

In some ways the adjective seemed a ridiculous one to label a self-confessed FIA operative, yet Chakotay's whole being insisted it was the only word that truly fit the younger man. Tom hadn't *chosen* to become a spy. From the moment that his body had been illegally adapted, Tom had lost *any* choice over his own life. Between his 'programming' and the terror of being euthanized, Tom would barely have dared breathe without the FIA's permission and so he'd been nothing more than a helpless pawn in their hands. 

Had Tom been an adult when he'd been modified, Chakotay might have felt less understanding of the decisions he'd subsequently made. But Tom had been a child. 

It was that which fuelled the burning fury in Chakotay's heart; the fact that a father had allowed such an evil thing to happen to his own son. How could *any* boy survive such a betrayal? A man, in a similar situation, might have turned on his abusers in rage but a child would have been incapable of that righteous anger. A child, like Tom, would have seen fault in himself rather than in his father. A child, desperate for love and acceptance, would have tried to become that which his father had chosen to make him.

Tom had never stood a chance against the machinations of the FIA. 
He wasn't responsible. It wasn't his fault. Therefore he was innocent.

His newfound understanding of the younger man should have made Chakotay's designated role easier. Under any other circumstances, he would have welcomed the opportunity to invite Tom back into his bed…and back into his heart. Chakotay was slow to anger and even slower to forgive if ever that anger was allowed to erupt. Yet, once he'd made the decision that forgiveness was to be granted, Chakotay's heart was decisive and sure. 

He was equally sure *now* that Tom hadn't been faking his emotions in their previous encounters. Perhaps Tom's actions and words had been motivated by external forces but his affection had been genuine regardless. Another snippet of Kathryn and Tom's conversation had burned itself into Chakotay's awareness: 

" 'Except when you wanted to run away with Chakotay?' 
'It was just a fantasy. That's all. He wouldn't have taken me. I know that now.'
'But you believed it at the time.'
'Yeah, well I've grown up since then'." 

The sad bitter resignation in Tom's tone haunted Chakotay. He himself lived with the same legacy of shattered dreams. To realize that his own pain had been shared by Tom was satisfying in some less than honorable way but that small satisfaction was negated by reality. He, at least, had been able to counter that pain with anger and righteous indignation. Tom hadn't even had that much of a safety net. Tom's anguish had walked hand-in-hand with guilt, fear and physical suffering.

So who was he to accuse Tom of betrayal, anyway?

Hadn't he lied too when he'd sent Tom into Will's hands? Regardless of his reasons for the lie, or the white-hot fury that had inspired it, he had deliberately and ruthlessly arranged for Tom's capture and imprisonment.

By failing to tell the truth about his own identity, he would effectively be betraying Tom once more by asking for trust without giving it. Although he hoped that Tom would forgive him the deception, he had no right to expect that forgiveness given his own reaction to Tom's own deceit.

Besides, that was *best* case scenario. The sad reality was that Tom was unlikely to voluntarily offer him enough trust to even *feel* betrayed again. Chakotay didn't have time to seduce Tom. Before another night passed Tom either had to be 'under control' and ready to go back to the helm, or he needed to be safely inside a stasis chamber where he couldn't 'contaminate' the rest of the crew with his knowledge of the Captain's actions. 

So Chakotay had no choice except to become what he most despised.

He wouldn't baulk at his task only from fear of having his own heart broken again. In honesty, he wouldn't even hesitate for the sake of protecting Tom's heart. Where he stumbled over his orders was the necessity to use and re-enforce Tom's conditioning to carry them out. It didn't matter that his motives were good or that they would ensure Tom's survival. It still made him no better than Tuvok and the Admiral since they had also used Tom under the mandate that 'the ends justified the means'. 

It also made him less than sanguine over his own loyalty to the SCC, since Kathryn's explanation of Tom's presence on Voyager proved that his own colleagues and superiors were showing an equally distressing tendency to consider Tom as nothing more than a tool to be used and then ultimately discarded.

To hell with their excuse of the Eugenics Laws. Those had *never* been intended as a means to legally murder a blameless victim like Tom evidently was. Although clause 23.5 of the Eugenics Code said that any humanoid who was found to have been genetically modified into a 'super-being' would be euthanized, it wasn't intended to be the justification of the death penalty for an innocent victim. It was just intended to deter people who might otherwise volunteer to be modified.

If the full circumstances of what had been done to Tom were made public, no court in the Alpha Quadrant would approve of his termination. The public outcry against such blatant unfairness would prevent any politically ambitious judge even dreaming of taking such punitive action. 

Which told Chakotay two things. That the trial of Admiral Paris had always been intended to be held behind closed doors, and that Katherine had been telling the truth when she'd said her intention had originally been to hand Tom over to him for safe keeping while she tried to negotiate for Tom's life. She *knew* Tom would be quietly executed by the SCC when the trial was over. Not because of what he was, or what he'd done, but because of what he knew.

Or maybe just because he was Owen Paris' son. Humans had always had a depressing history of punishing sons for the sins of their fathers, as though the potential for evil could be transmitted through shared DNA. 

But Katherine wanted Tom to survive and, from what she'd told him, other influential SCC Officers were of the same opinion. Jean-Luc Picard, for one, and no one could doubt *his* reputation for preventing miscarriages of justice. Picard wouldn't quietly stand by and allow Tom to be murdered just for the sake of expediency.

So, although there were no actual guarantees, the chances were that if they managed to get home in time to make a difference Tom *would* walk away from that court a free man.

Knowing *that*, how could Chakotay go through with it? How could he play on Tom's fears, knowing them to be false?

That would be the *true* betrayal. Not his failure to confess his own position as an SCC operative, but that he would use Tom's conditioning and his terror of the eugenics code to control his behavior.

Just as Tuvok had done.

Yet, he had no option. Tom would undoubtedly realize that the deaths of the would-be mutineers was no 'accident' and he couldn't be allowed to spread that knowledge among the remaining crew. Kathryn had made it plain enough when she'd said, 'Unless you convince me that Tom is under your control, I'll have no option except to put him in stasis too.' 

And if he hadn't believed her words alone, the open stasis chamber in the sickbay was bleak and unavoidable evidence of the seriousness of her intent.

"It's not just that we might never get home," Chakotay whispered to the unconscious blond. "You could spend eternity entombed in that chamber and I don't think I could bear to go on living on this ship, knowing you're in here, effectively buried alive. But at least you'd be unconscious. You'd never feel pain or know fear. You'd just sleep and grow old and die without ever suffering again and you've suffered enough, Tom. More than enough for a dozen lifetimes.

"But what if we *do* get home? How the hell can we convince the SCC that you should be allowed to live if, by imprisoning you in stasis, we've confirmed that *we* considered you dangerous and uncontrollable too? That stasis chamber isn't just your potential prison, Tom. It's your death sentence.

"So, although I know you'll never understand or forgive what I'm about to do, *that's* why I'm going to do it. I'm going to use your modifications to control you and, between your realization that the Captain is SCC and your conditioning, you'll have no choice except to obey me. And no matter how gently I touch you, and I promise that I will be gentle, Tom, you'll justifiably hate me for using you like that. Whatever little love you still might have for me will be destroyed the moment I force you into my bed. In your eyes I'll just be another in the long line of people who have abused you, like Tuvok and Dukat and your own fucking father."

And in the privacy of the empty sickbay, witnessed only by the unseeing eyes of an entombed Vulcan, Chakotay lay his head down on Tom's unconscious chest and wept.

~#~#~#~

He woke into pain, ceaseless throbbing waves of sensation that centered in his groin and left thigh and then rippled in Mexican waves down to the soles of his feet and the top of his head. A fiery burn of reawakening nerve endings and an old familiar sting in his veins as his blood rushed to repair damaged cells and torn flesh.

Then, as his brain processed the agony coursing through his extremities, he began to splinter into two Toms. The one who suffered and screamed silently in the back of his head and the one who welcomed and embraced the pain, revitalized and aroused by its effect on his cruelly manipulated synapses.

It was the silent Tom who snapped to awareness first, while the other simply writhed in pleasure at the sensory overload. It was that Tom who met understanding with a muted howl of grief, who remembered everything that had happened and, in remembering, understood the cost of his own foolish faith in the Captain. It was that Tom who wailed in horror at the realization that Ken was dead.

But it was the other Tom who opened his eyes and stared with heated interest at the man at his bedside. The other Tom who licked his lips and writhed helplessly as a broad, wide palm slipped purposefully up his burning thigh and pressed meaningfully at the place where his bedsheets were tented with hungry need.

And the silent Tom sobbed and pleaded that this shouldn't happen. That he should be allowed, at least, to grieve his lover in peace. That surely it had been punishment enough that he had witnessed the physical destruction of Ken without being forced to endure the shattering of his only remaining fantasy - the belief that Chakotay was a *good* man.

"You know what I am," the other Tom purred, bucking suggestively into Chakotay's hand. 

"You're a mod," Chakotay confirmed, his eyes dark as his fingers tightened and squeezed cruelly against Tom's overheated cock. "A modified human, programmed for complete obedience in all things, including *this*."

Teeth snapping, eyes aflame, Tom surged upright and launched his mouth towards Chakotay's jaw. The sudden movement sent a shockwave of pain through his body, kicking through his kidneys then lancing upwards like a thousand needle-sharp teeth gnawing into his brain.

"Want you…need you…" he hissed, nuzzling his face against the salt-sweet taste of Chakotay's neck.

"You're mine," Chakotay growled, his fingers closing over Tom's shoulders and gripping with bruising intensity as he pushed Tom's face away until their eyes met. "Do you understand, Tom? From now on you're *mine*. You obey *me*. Only me."

"Yours," Tom agreed breathlessly, twisting desperately in Chakotay's painful grasp, humping against Chakotay's knee, his eyes so dilated with need that they were almost black. 

The silent Tom's screams began to fade behind those sex-hazed eyes, muted by an old familiar chill that was creeping inexorably into the vacant place where his heart had once lived.

Tom arched helplessly under the possessive fingers of the man he now could see only as the latest in long line of betrayers, helpless against the demand to give his body and allegiance to the only person senior enough in rank to make his programming respond now that he'd identified Janeway as one of 'the enemy'.

And so Silent Tom, the last echo of the trusting, foolish dreaming child he'd once been, curled up into a tiny quaking ball in the furthest reaches of Tom's mind and made the decision never to risk emerging again.

Go to part Twenty-Three