After their game, after the meetings and trials and everything else Starfleet throws at them, after he goes back to Trebus, Chakotay begins to realize what he’s lost. What he gave up when he stopped trying. He’s finally free to do whatever he wants, with no obligations - not to his tribe, not to his family, not to the Maquis or to Starfleet or to his Captain - but finds there’s one promise he made to himself that he WANTS to keep fulfilling. So he goes back to Earth. Gets a little one bedroom apartment in San Francisco, accepts a teaching position at a local college, and Monday mornings he has a single pink rose delivered to Kathryn’s office. Subtly, no fanfare, it’s just there when she gets to work. He doesn’t hear from her for the entire semester, until a few days after classes end, she shows up at his apartment (he isn’t surprised she knows where he lives) with a bottle of Anterian Cider, and they talk, and she’s still guarded but it’s better than it was. So he bribes her with coffee and they start meeting up a few times a week, and he keeps sending the flower, and she keeps randomly showing up at his place with cider (he thinks she might be testing him, but she never says and he’s always alone) until one night she cracks, and asks him what he wants from her, and he doesn’t know what to say because the answer is “everything” - so he says battleship instead, and she gets it, and a few weeks later she shows up with the game, and sometimes she wins and sometimes he wins (and all the while they talk - about their jobs and their pasts and Voyager and the future and little, silly things like how much he likes citrus fruits and Kathryn’s childhood affinity for Shetland ponies) and then one night, they tie - both deadlocked without a move, and he knows (even before the first kiss) that they’re going to be just fine.
