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i.
Raffi was busy staring into an untouched glass of something that looked like nothing so much as engine coolant when Seven of Nine walked into the room; she leaned against a wall looking at Raffi, and didn’t say anything.
“You heard about Picard?”
“Just now,” Seven answered. “Jurati told me.”
“I guess it’s just a pity they didn’t tell us they were going to bring JL back before we all said our tearful goodbyes out on that hillside.”
“I didn’t cry. And my thing wasn’t about Picard.” Raffi’s look said oh, honey, and Seven conceded, “Okay, maybe it was a little bit about Picard. Rios isn’t the only one around here with old captain issues.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Fair enough. “Hey, if you didn’t know about Picard what are you doing down here in Synthville? I though you were staying on the Artifact.”
“I’m making arrangements for the xBees to stay.”
“Stay? Here? Wow.”
“It’s not easy to be a former drone, even when—”
“Even when you look like someone’s fantasy of a hot Borg chick?”
Seven artfully arched the implant that curved around her eye socket; whoever had liberated her from the collective had paid a hell of a lot of attention to aesthetics. “Even when you can handle yourself, was what I was going to say. The Synthetics don’t have the same history with Borg as the rest of the galaxy. They don’t hate the xBees, and they aren’t afraid of us. It’s the safest place for them.”
“Them?” Raffi asked. “You’re not staying too.”
Seven shrugged. “I’m not Hugh. I can’t help these people, and the last time I told someone who had been Borg that they could live a normal life out there - ” she waved her hand in a dismissive gesture that seemed to encompass the entire alpha and beta quadrants “ - it ended badly.”
“I heard about what happened on Freecloud,” said Raffi softly. “You went back and killed her, right?”
Seven pulled out a chair and sat down, she picked up Raffi’s untouched drink and inhaled deeply. “How did you know?”
“I have a son too. It’s what I would have done.”
“Where is he now?”
“Exactly where he wants to be,” said Raffi, her fingers clenching around a glass that wasn’t there, “far, far away from me.”
“At least he’s alive.” Seven downed Raffi’s drink in one, coughed, grimaced, and said, “If you ever feel like a real drink come up to the Cube, the Romulans left the good stuff behind.”
ii.
When Raffi walked onto the Artifact Seven was bent over a console.
“Now that,” she said, “is one hell of a bomb.”
“Sell off all the Borg tech on this Cube and you could buy yourself a solar system. The xBees and Synthetics will never be safe as long as it’s here; it’s too valuable.” Seven straightened up and turned, and Raffi’s eyes wandered from her long legs and curved hips to her defined shoulders and the blonde waves of her hair. “Do you want it in Federation credits or gold pressed latinum?”
“Hmm?”
“How much my implants are worth.”
“Oh, honey,” said Raffi, “that wasn’t why I was staring.”
“I know.” Seven’s mouth twitched up. “What was it you said, ‘someone’s fantasy of a hot Borg chick’?”
“Someone’s,” said Raffi with a grin, “not necessarily mine.”
“I promised you a real drink,” said Seven, tipping her head towards the interior of the Artifact. “Come on.”
Raffi followed Seven up never-ending flights of stairs, across open walkways over an abyss, and then more stairs. Seven finally stopped at a door marked by a heap of carelessly piled clothes and books, she kicked a stray boot out of the way, and palmed the door open.
Raffi followed Seven into the room she’d taken from some Romulan subcommander, dumping all of the previous occupants possessions on the floor outside apart from several bottles of Romulan liquor.
Raffi looked around the empty room, from the unmade bed to the assortment of bottles. “I love what you’ve done with place.”
“Thanks,” said Seven. She poured out two glasses of blue liquid and handed one to Raffi. “Looks like mouthwash, tastes like absinthe, but—”
“It does the trick,” said Raffi clinking their glasses together. They downed their drinks in unison; they were standing very close.
“Look,” said Seven, “it’s been a hell of a few weeks, and I’ve never been good at small talk—” and Raffi closed the distance and kissed her.
“Hey,” said Raffi, pulling back, “this place isn’t going to fall down around us while we’re…?” Seven did that thing where it looked like she was arching her ocular implant. “Honey, I just caught you planting a bomb downstairs.”
“Oh, that.” Seven slipped her hands inside Raffi’s collar and pushed her jacket down her arms. The sensation of Seven’s hands running over her biceps was a strange one; one of her hands was flesh and blood and the other was partially encased in metal, strange but…interesting. “It’ll take more than that to destroy this Cube, the device downstairs wouldn’t even shake its foundations.”
“Pity,” said Raffi, shucking her jacket with a grin, “I was kind of looking forward to having my foundations shaken.” Seven’s nose screwed up. “No?”
“No.”
“Okay,” said Raffi, closing the distance between them again. “No lines. Got it."
Seven quickly got to work unfastening Raffi’s belt and undoing the buttons of her pants - Raffi always had felt that efficiency was a quality to be admired. Raffi, for her part, slid her hands under Seven’s tank top and pushed up, taking Seven’s bra with it. They broke apart as they both tried to pull the clothes over Seven’s head, which got tangled in her hair.
Raffi stepped back, expecting to enjoy a long look at Seven’s pretty fucking impressive breasts, instead her eyes were unavoidably drawn to the irregularly shaped metal implant that erupted from Seven’s side, edged by blue veined grey skin that only reluctantly gave way to pink flesh. It was the first implant of Seven’s that Raffi had seen that was anything less than artful, that didn’t try to hide the ugliness and trauma she’d been through.
“Problem?” Even topless and exposed Seven of Nine could still manage to sound arch, and Raffi couldn’t help but find it fucking hot.
She hauled Seven close by the waistband of her pants. “Hell no,” she said, trying to kiss her and walk her backwards towards the unmade bed at the same time.
The next few hours were highly educational for Raffi. She learned that one of Seven’s legs was covered up to the knee in the same Borg mesh that covered her hand; she learned that one of Seven’s hips was entirely bionic; she learned that that the Borg had so screwed up Seven’s nerve endings that in some places she had to bite and claw and pinch for Seven to even feel it. She learned that she didn’t like the sensation of Seven’s metal hand inside her, and that Seven didn’t mind starting over with her mouth and flesh and blood hand.
Afterwards they lay in bed together, Raffi idly running her fingernails up and down Seven’s arm, skirting round the starburst implant on her bicep. “How are you planning to get back to Fenris? If you’re going to blow the Artifact, that is.”
“You think Picard will make me hitchhike back?”
“Speaking of Picard,” said Raffi, “I saw him today.”
Seven turned away from Raffi, rolling onto her back. “How was he?” she asked with poorly feigned indifference.
“It wasn’t him. It was the, um, they’re calling it a golem. It looked like JL. I mean, Seven, it looked exactly like him. Like a life sized Picard doll—”
“Sounds disturbing.”
“But there was no-one at home. I don’t know if there ever will be.”
The way they were lying meant Raffi felt more than saw Seven’s shrug. “I’m the wrong woman to ask about the dividing line between man and machine, but I do know that if there’s anyone too stubborn to die then it’s Picard.”
“Hmm,” said Raffi, smothering a yawn.
“If you’re getting tired you should head back to La Sirena."
“Oh,” said Raffi. “Right.”
“It’s—”
“No. I get it.” Raffi sat up and looked around the room, calculating how quickly she could get dressed, and what was the minimum amount of clothing she could be wearing when she beamed back to La Sirena that wouldn’t invite any questions from Chris. “I’ll see you around, Seven.”
iii.
The next time Raffi saw Seven it was in La Sirena’s mess hall, that tiny sliver of space between the sickbay and bridge. “What are you doing here?”
“Replicating explosives,” said Seven, holding open the rucksack she was holding, which was indeed full of bombs. “I was hoping to see you. What happened on the Cube—”
“Hey,” said Raffi, holding her palms up in an it’s cool gesture. “We’re adults. Like you said, it had been one hell of a couple of weeks. We both wanted a hookup. You didn’t want a repeat performance, and let me know that. No hard feelings.”
Seven’s mouth curled into an almost smirk. “I would enjoy a repeat performance quite a lot actually.”
“I’m not fishing for compliments here, but it sure didn’t seem like it.”
Seven frowned, and set down her big bag of bombs. “I had to regenerate.” Well. That wasn’t what Raffi had been expecting. “I have to do it every few days or my Borg implants will start to break down. I had a set up on my ship, which Picard destroyed, so I’ve been using an alcove on the Cube. It’s more…old school than I’m used to now, and if I have to use it I prefer to do so in privacy.”
Raffi exhaled. “I guess if people wanted to harvest me for parts I wouldn’t want anyone there while I slept either.”
“It happens once, shame on them,” said Seven, “more than that, shame on me.”
"Oh, baby.” Raffi reached out and took Seven’s hand; Seven interlaced their fingers and looked like she was about to say something, which was, of course, when Elnor bounced in like an adorable, not-housebroken puppy.
“What’s going on?”
They both pulled their hands back. “Seven’s going to destroy the Artifact,” said Raffi.
Seven held up her bag of explosives. “Want to come watch?”
“Hell, yes!” said Elnor. “I’ll get Captain Rios and Doctor Jurati.”
“Great,” said Raffi, catching Seven’s eye-roll and returning it. “It can be a whole family affair.”
“Why not invite the Synthetics too?” Seven muttered under her breath, following Elnor up the ladder.
“Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” said Raffi, following after her. “I don’t think Soji for one would be sorry to see that place blown to smithereens.”
iv.
In the end Agnes and Soji missed the fireworks. At the exact same moment that the Artifact was being reduced to its component pieces, and those pieces were being reduced to their component atoms, the consciousness of Jean Luc Picard was being transferred into a synthetic golem that was the spitting image of him as he had been in life.
Raffi figured she had finally hit the amount of booze required to be okay with that, and it was the last quarter of that bottle of bourbon that she and Seven had finished off before falling into bed together in Raffi’s bunk in La Sirena.
“You don’t seem that all impressed with Picard coming back from the dead,” she said. Impressed or freaked out.
Seven half-shrugged. ‘“You can do it with Borg nano-probes.” Huh. “Not that I’d wish that on Picard.” But before Raffi could follow up on that, Seven said, “By the way, I don’t need a lift back to Fenris anymore.”
“…You’re staying on Ghoulian IV after all?”
“God, no. But whatever wakeup call Picard gave the Federation, they’ve started patrolling the Neutral Zone again. There were some things I did when I was a Ranger, things that I’m not entirely proud of, and would definitely prefer not to have to explain to Starfleet.”
Raffi swallowed a mysterious lump in her throat; sure, Seven of Nine was a good fuck-buddy and an even better drinking-buddy, but doing favours for her friends was what Raffi did. “If it’s just a matter of deleting some records and scrubbing your name from a wanted list, maybe Aunty Raffi could hook you up, I’ve still got some friends in high places.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Of course. Seven had come back from the delta quadrant on that ship Voyager, whose captain was now a high and mighty admiral, whose every crew member was at least a minor celebrity, and Seven had been out here on the fringes playing space cowboy. “You guys aren’t close?”
Raffi expected Seven to roll away or at least stare at the ceiling; instead she curled closer and avoided Raffi’s eyes by staring at her mouth. “You should have seen me when I was first separated from the collective, Raffi. I made Elnor look streetwise.” A babe in the woods who looked like Seven of Nine. Yeah. Ouch. “By the time we got back the alpha quadrant the black market in Borg tech was already thriving, and I had to figure out who I was here and—”
“Swaggering vigilante badass not what they had in mind?”
“Something like that.”
“You know that wakeup call Starfleet got, it included offering Picard his commission back. His choice of ship, the best crew the academy could spit out.”
“Good for Picard, I suppose.”
“He turned them down,” said Raffi. “JL said he wouldn’t take it without me, Chris, and Agnes, and weirdly enough it turns out that a conspiracy theorist, a walking personality disorder, and the galaxy’s fluffiest confessed murderer are not high on Starfleet’s hiring list.” That lump in Raffi’s throat was back for some reason. “I’m just saying, an ex-borg vigilante doesn’t sound that out of place in all that.”
Seven didn’t say anything, but instead kissed Raffi.
v.
Raffi was only half awake when she heard the door to her bunk on La Sirena hiss open.
Technically Seven had her own bunk on the ship, where presumably she’d stashed whatever Borg regeneration tech she’d swiped from the Artifact before blowing it to fuck. Raffi hadn’t asked; she’d screwed up a lot of things in her life, but she was trying her hardest not to fuck up her brand new, baby relationship with Seven. And if Raffi hadn’t seen the inside of Seven’s bunk, Seven sure was seeing a hell of a lot of the inside of Raffi’s.
Raffi kept her back turned and listened; she heard Seven tossing aside her leather jacket, the twin thumps of her kicking her boots off, and her awkward shuffling step-and-half as she took her pants off.
The mattress dipped as Seven sat down on its edge; Raffi turned over, wrapped her arm around Seven’s waist and pressed her lips to her spine. “Picard says we’re leaving today.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
"Seems like he really means it this time.”
“Where are we going?”
“Fuck knows.”
Raffi could hear the smile in Seven’s voice. “Fuck knows," she echoed.