"A few weeks," she said again, willing it to be true. 

(AU HEADCANON DUMP UNDERNEATH...)

I gotta read more of Protectors sdfhkdjhgfk. I got to their farewell scene and then SLEPT ‘cause I ZOOOOOMED through The Eternal Tide hahaha. I guess I’d say that my CURRENT™ idea is that she finds out she’s [WHOOPSIES] the night before she leaves the fleet to return to Earth. (If it matters, there’s apparently like a three week interval between The Eternal Tide and Protectors where Chakotay and Janeway are essentially INSEPARABLE and sleep with each other every night haha. So perhaps somewhat unrealistically she’d be finding out VERY EARLY, but in the context of AU she’d have been inconveniently broaching her heat cycle around this time. And, despite taking every foreseeable precaution, suppressant, contraceptive, etc. prior to being intimate while on it, has the sneaking suspicion that none of these remedies effectively prevented her cycle from doing its job.) In the book it almost seems like she’s being evasive with Chakotay (If she isn’t just ride the AU interpretation high with me besties hahaha), they don’t sleep together, she catches up with Neelix and his wife in addition to chatting with Tom who ironically is ALSO expecting with B’Elanna, though I doubt either party would disclose this information to each other, likely it’ll get addressed later in the book hehe. I also find it funny that Chakotay takes note of the fact that he wakes up in bed alone and sweetly confronts her on it, but she kinda evades reasoning by listing all these excuses like being too busy visiting with Tom and Neelix. (I like to think she’d maybe have had some early onset morning sickness and THAT would set off the alarms and sneaking suspicions in her head hehe, but also inevitably the reason why she wasn’t in bed when he woke up.) But yes hohoho Kathryn and Chakotay say their goodbyes to one another, Chakotay mentions that if she’s in need of anything to then by all means contact him/the fleet, Kathryn defiantly says it’ll only be a few weeks til she returns, internally disputing any other alternative. She would choose not to tell him on their last day together, it’s cute too to take note of their goodbye kiss and how she lingers in it longer than Chakotay expects her to, I can twist that into her feeling like it’s the beginning of an end of something that only she knows about. :~)