Had he been human, the doctor's first activation in the open air would have pleasant.

The sea breeze had found a path through the brackish coastal fringe, steady but warm. The sunrise glinting over the volcanic peak was still mellow, edging the greenery with gold.

As it was, for him, it felt more like he imagined a hangover might. Every component sore, the light too bright, and subroutines coming online in the wrong order. He heard breathing nearby, but vision was lagging, and his attempt to take a step forward overshot and landed him in the mud.

"Please state the nature," he said vaguely upwards, turning onto his back, to the resolving blob leaning over him, "of the medical emergency."

And then, as it came into focus, silhouetted a bit but so very sufficient for identification, "Commander?"

"Doc?"

Chakotay looked like absolute hell, flesh shrunken over his big frame. His uniform was stained, cut off at the elbows and ripped off at the calves. What looked like an extremely homemade tension-based projectile weapon was slung across his back. The first sign of memory coming online was a helpful reminder that Chakotay's tribe had never been much for archery.

He was the most beautiful sight imaginable.

The doctor leapt up and caught him in a bear hug. A moment later he realized he was compressing him a bit too easily, and lightened the pressure. And, then, that his leap had been handless and altogether effortless.

Chakotay, bemused, returned the hug as he got his wind back, and then took a step back for a better look. "You all right?"

"I'm…" Memory had come fully online meanwhile, and it dawned on him that he should under no circumstances be, in any way, all right.

And that most swamps had not quite so many less-than-fresh drone corpses scattered around.

And –

"Kes!" He spun around, from the trees to the wreckage of the shuttle and back again. He scanned the drone bodies by size and features, where he stood, barely noticing that his processing was smooth and even, over-powered for the task.

No Kes anywhere, augmented or otherwise. Back to Chakotay. "Have you seen her?" Even as he said it, his heart sank. Chronometry, coming online, was informing him six days had passed.

The Commander shook his head. Fine detail vision was back now; there were half-healed scars along both his forearms, one or two shaped very much like the jaws of those apex predators. "We thought we lost you both on Voyager. She was with you?"

"We were…" he trailed off, looking back at the shuttle's wreckage. His speech subroutines still weren't up to speed. "On an island. Then, here. Then…" Feeling its utter inadequacy, he closed with, "…the Borg."

Chakotay put a hand on his shoulder. "They've been hounding us since landing, too. But you know they have their own problems here. It doesn't always end in assimilation. Maybe we can recover her in time."

Grief and confusion made a small bit more room for hope. "It doesn't? Didn't?"

Chakotay stepped back a bit and, bizarrely, circled him, as if there were something to be gained from inspecting the different angles of a hologram. "What's your condition?"

"How long have you got, Commander?" That was a bit better.

There, a chuckle, a flash of the man's old self. "I mean, are you functioning properly? You must have been offline for most of it, to still have power now. But…" He trailed off and, apparently too polite to bring up the speech issue, waved his hand around the largely bloodless carnage scattered round them.

It never occurred to the Doctor, till much later, that he could have said anything but the truth. Or what the risks of saying it might be. "That was me. Well, mostly Kes. Perhaps half me." He was scanning through the bodies again from where he stood, numbering them. The ones that had still been living when he crashed were gone. Paris included.

His eyes went back to the sky; the Cube was still directly overhead. Chakotay's glance followed, with a reflexiveness that suggested long practice too, and then fixed itself back on him.

It appeared more explanation was in order.

"You see, my ethical restraints are mostly gone."

From the way the Commander's expression shifted, that had been a poor note to lead with. "Duty's intact," he added hastily. "Personality, if you consider that a positive. Most of my databases. But my matrix…"

Then he trailed off, in an astonishment too profound to process words about, as the realization washed over him. The matrix was whole.

Not, not whole. Mended.

Shored up at the joints, with something different from the original. Something more organic, bends in place of angles, fairly shimmering with power. He looked down at his emitter, which looked normal as he scanned through the visual and infrared spectra, till it didn't.

Something dark and light and nearly breathing was laced round and through it, extending countless massless filaments all to the plant life tangled round them, filling in like a gifted lung for all the broken parts of him.

It was clear now where his power was coming from. And, to some over-powered associative routine of his, what a fire and a windmill had in common. They were both bridges, in their way, from one form of energy to another. The same way a different Ocampan hero, with a knack for plants and a bit of field engineering practice, might bridge the gifted energy of the local biosphere into a current to run a broken program on a holoemitter.

He could have laughed, or whooped, or danced, except that any of those seemed likely to confirm his insanity to the present company. So he only spoke, half to himself. "I'll be damned. She found a way."

"Damned?" echoed Chakotay, who was putting a bit more space between them.

Guiltily, he expanded the list of his transgressions. "I did also enable profanity." He pulled himself together and addressed the issue at hand. "I don't believe myself to be a danger. But they just kept coming, and one thing led to another…and anyway, it turns out, loyalty doesn't rest on ethics."

Chakotay, who looked for a moment as if he understood that gibberish perfectly, then apparently decided to cut to the heart of the matter anyway. Moving like a man who'd seen more than one demon with a loved one's face lately, he lunged for the emitter.

The doctor danced back easily; his processing speed was so quick now, the movements of the rest of the world seemed leisurely. Chakotay closed again, and he let him this time. They tumbled in the mud, one grappling with desperate courage, the other trying with desperate resolve not to laugh like a lunatic. The main challenge was not to hurt him; the power stream needed a bit more practice to control.

To end it, he pinned the Commander, feeling rather like a kitten pinning a mastiff, till the point was made. Then he rolled off into the ground beside him.

"Not the ethical subroutines," he clarified patiently, in what he suspected was lecture voice finally coming online. "Well. Possibly I muted them, from time to time. But I meant the restraints." He offered up his shoulder with the emitter. "If you're going to deactivate me for repair, please be very careful with this."

Chakotay sat up, looking him up and down. He was breathing hard and thoroughly muddy, but his lip was twitching, and for a moment he couldn't seem to decide whether to control it or not. "Sorry, doc. I had to know." Then the bleakness returned and settled in the lines again. "The last few months have been quite a ride."

The Doctor could well imagine. "I have," he replied helpfully after a moment, still struggling to keep a lid on the unhinged joy lighting him up, "an expanded database on trauma counselling."

"You," Chakotay answered, rising and offering him a thoroughly superfluous hand up, "are going to need it." He turned back to the undergrowth against the orange horizon and bellowed. "It's all right!"

It began, some ways off, to rustle. Then a face, a few, then more, oh, more, a small search party, but if these were alive -

"How many crew remaining?" he croaked.

"A hundred and twelve landed – and some will be very glad to see you - thirty-two assimilated, six killed, two now MIA."

"Kes. And Ensign Blain?" He had been turning back and forth, peering into each face as it appeared, Ensigns Kaplan and Lang and then Mannus, but that stopped him. He turned back to Chakotay. "He's KIA. Saving Kes and me. Extraordinary valor, is what I mean to say."

The joy felt odd beside the sorrow; the hybrid matrix rang with both.

The Commander nodded once, unsurprised. "So noted for the ship's log. When you're able, I'd like you to see Tuvok and Vorik first. Perhaps there's something you can do."

"Both? It's a Vulcan ailment? Are they here?"

"Back at the caves." He gestured north-northeast. "You might say telepathic exhaustion. They're convinced this cube has drones probing for us telepathically, that this many minds together would stand out. They dug up a shielding technique from the darker parts of Vulcan history, and started trading shifts. They won't talk about the headaches, but they can't tolerate light anymore."

You might also have considered what that would do to a friendly search by your own missing telepath, he didn't say. It wasn't fair; for all they'd known, even if she still lived, Kes might have no longer been a friendly.

"Certainly. Can I ask…is Naomi with you? Miss Wildman?"

"She's our best cave fisher. Small hands." There it was, that little smile, a momentary shade of that ease in his eyes, but – "What about Kes?"

He was still reeling from the revisions to his crew complement estimate. And the middle of the search party was in full sight now, drawing up behind Chakotay - Crewmen Boylan and Chell, and there, Ensign McCormack - while others rustled still out of sight around them, clearing the perimeter. Across all his subroutines, it was like another sort of power surge.

He did focus and even drew breath to answer fully, but then fumbled it and settled for the basics.

"She's quite close, I think. I understand a bit now. She's…not the same. It's been a ride for the Ocampa life cycle too. But when we sort it out, I think she'll be as relieved to see you as I am." Then, because he couldn't help it anymore, plaintively, to all of them - "But we looked for you. We…she made so many trips north. She grew so much food. I climbed a mountain."

Chakotay's face, hearing him, went through a memorable sequence of expressions over the next few seconds. A particular sort of visible surprise first; a man reaching full understanding of something he'd thought he knew already. Then he went opaque, just long enough to thoroughly rub in the injustice of his having a better poker face than a computer program. Finally, in an inexpressibly Chakotay way, he took the Doctor's hand and shook it solemnly.

"That's on behalf of the Captain, then. Of course you don't remember."

Fairly certain that at this point it was not his own functionality standing in the way of making sense of that, the Doctor waited.

Chakotay let go and faced him squarely, as the others who had come up round them began to investigate the altered shuttle.

"We couldn't know who would get assimilated. So none of us, organics, could know the pods' destination before landing. Only the Captain and I even knew you'd programmed it in. And then…" He trailed off with an expressive shrug, but at that point, the Doctor was half listening anyway; he was focused on ransacking his stored memory.

Nothing. He turned all his splendid new processing power loose on it.

Yes, all right; there were deleted files for the block of time between finishing the warhead and waking on the shuttle. But their remnants had been the first to be overwritten after landing. A master-planned job, done by someone who knew the hiding places in his head.

Like himself.

"I think your exact words were," Chakotay was saying, with his particular odd gentleness, "'You need it picked by someone who can forget things properly, and I'm the only non-organic who's qualified. So unless you want one of Mr. Paris' holodeck bartenders choosing your new home, give me the pod command codes. And respectfully, Captain, your grand going-down-with-the-ship gesture also needs backup from someone with fewer fleshy bits.'"

All of that, including the faint answering embarrassment at that impression of his own tone, processed in a picosecond that felt substantially longer. Somehow, all the Doctor could manage aloud in return was an oddly apologetic, "You see, no one told Kes."

Chakotay achieved a half-smile which somehow managed to encompass ruefulness, and relief, and their mutual orphanhood, the two of them reunited without the other member of that lost conversation.

After a moment, he offered, "Most likely, you kept us all free. They only ever found anyone when we foraged above ground. But you can't feed that many crew entirely underground. Then, a few days ago, I'd guess the same time as all this," – he gestured broadly at the surrounding carnage - "they stopped finding us at all. Just as the cube centered itself over you. Like it thought it was a signpost."

The Doctor nodded. "I think they've had other priorities. 'All this' that night, and possibly thruster repair ever since." He was finally processing it properly, just as the vanguard of the search party crawled out of the shuttle behind him, looking collectively puzzled. "They very nearly had us, you know."

Chakotay studied them, and him. "You have quite a story. Come and tell it. Welcome back."

And there, finally, they were slogging through the undergrowth, bringing up the rear, the sun still behind them but close enough to make out their faces now - B'elanna, Neelix, Harry.

So all was nearly well. As much as it could be, for a starship's crew stuck forever on a silent planet under an enemy's eye.

He wanted to tell Kes. He looked down at the emitter, unsure if she could hear him in this form, or knew already. But it glinted back in his extended visual spectrum, just the way the rising sun was glinting off the cube in the sky, and that was when he finally understood.

He drew power through her, a thick deep draught of it, smooth as her skin against his. Enough to fling a starship ten thousand miles, he supposed, but he didn't need that much. Complicating things, Neelix, and – to his utter surprise - B'elanna, blissfully unaware of what a free radical he was, had meanwhile thrown their arms round him, and he needed both his hands to hug them back. But over their shoulders, as he memorized all that living warmth and organic messiness in his arms, he still had to ask.

"Commander," he said abruptly, ringed by the full search party now, drinking in their exhausted faces like the current. "Are you ready to go home?"

Chakotay looked momentarily like he regretted giving him the seal of sanity to the others. "The ship's still gone, Doc. Kes must have told you."

"There's always a backup," he replied airily, waving one hand. Perhaps weakness had made him and Kes both brutal, but now they were no longer weak. "Permission to secure the Cube, individuate the remaining drones, and prepare it for humanoid habitation?"

"He's going down for repairs," Chakotay said to no one in particular, by way of explanation, into the stunned general silence that followed. B'elanna was stepping back for a better look at him, her eyebrows climbing halfway up her forehead. "Though he does have a hell of a grip now."

"What's powering your emitter?" she asked him, more to the point.

He decided to go with the shorter version again. "I think…the gift of a loyal friend." His mind was racing ahead, to the ways he might try to distentangle Kes from the emitter after taking the cube. To what she might be now.

To whether here, in this world, this time, she might stay. Or visit.

"Catch us up first, doc," said Chakotay. He slung an arm around his shoulder, pointing him back the way the party had come, but it was also clearly an order. "You can't need more than a half-day to do the rest."

"You're probably right," he agreed, confident he was missing a joke, but falling in anyway. "Hopefully meanwhile, you all can choose a name to christen it with. Something less barbaric than Borgager."

He might be a bit unhinged after all. Or, possibly, just happy.

When they got Kes out, he would ask her.