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When Agnes creeps back into the ship sometime around two a.m., she’s dry-eyed from multiple hours of staring up at the old Chateau ceiling, imagining she could count the individual dust particles floating down and landing on each eyeball.
Like counting sheep, but worse. And not at all restful.
Also not enough of a distraction for a woman who can do mental calculus to take her mind off the promise she’d made, then promptly broken. And the bits before that. The verbal challenge. The underhanded compliments. The… assimilation.
She makes herself think of it in technical terms, not in the ones the Queen used for it after. Something something distancing tactic, but she thinks the Star Fleet mandatory trauma counselor would forgive her for this one: she’s supposed to keep herself distant from intergalactic hive mind overlords.
So what if this is the first time in a long time keeping distant has felt hard.
“Agnes,” says said overlord upon her silent reentrance. “Nice to have you back.”
She bundles the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Keeps a good distance between her and the transporter pad, finding a cubby where the ship’s siding forms a little v. Sits, knees tucked up towards her chest. Three walls.
After the yelling that had followed her out of the room when she limited her access post-Rios-saving-transporter-fix, there’s something almost respectful about the Borg Queen’s silence. She watches from her self-made web, dangling delicately with her chin tipped to the side, fingers of one hand drumming a slow, silent pattern against the cuff on her wrist.
“Can I—” Agnes begins, and flinches at the sound of her own voice.
Her thoughts, she realizes, the whole time she was lying awake, had borrowed the voice of the woman in front of her. She’d forgotten, just for a second, what would come out of her lips when she spoke with her own.
“Can I talk to you? Can we talk. Like a... me saying way too many words at you about something you probably don’t even care about because you’re the Borg Queen but I need to say them anyway kind of talk?”
The Queen gives her a painstakingly slow blink. It reminds Agnes of nothing so much as herself, age eight, having learned it might make cats trust you more, lowering your eyelids, showing your comfort and ease. “I could never not care about you, Agnes,” she says. “But of course. Isn’t this what we agreed?”
She flinches. Digs her fingernails into her own knees through the pilfered throw. “Right,” she says. “Sad-sack stories. Yeah, this is one of those. Except I gave you the middle finger and fucked off to sulk about it so I’m not sure I get to come back and vent.”
A small, singular chuckle sets the cables vibrating. “That’s not much of an apology.”
“I’m getting there,” she snaps, and the faint look of surprise, the Queen’s quirked brow, makes her look away. She starts picking threads. Adds, “I mean… yeah. Sorry. That is part of why I’m here.”
“By all means then,” prompts the Queen, voice soft.
So Agnes sucks in a breath, engages in the futile effort of trying to shove one of the inch-long bits of string back into the weave, and begins.
“The first time someone… shoved their way into my mind without asking…”
“I never—”
She tries to hold up a hand, but can’t quite make her fingers let go of the blanket. “I know. I’m not talking about you. Just… Just let me say this like… like a person whose head you haven’t been in. It’s important to me, alright? And if I stop now I’m going to make a joke and run off again and I’m pretty sure you’d rather I stay.”
There’s a sound, the faintest mechanical whirr; she pictures the Queen’s head shifting back the other way, but keeps her own gaze low. “Of course, Agnes dear. I’m listening.”
“Thanks,” she says, a little too sharply. Lets out a little huff of air. “Right. Um… first time I got… mind-probed… it was about two years ago. Happened during one of the few times in the last decade when I was… kind of happy? Like, you’d probably still have called me out on some antisocial tendencies but I was at a surprisingly okay point in my life. After the synthetic ban, my job had gotten so understimulating that I was actually saying yes to working lunches with people I kind of liked just to kill time. Boredom made me pick up a few nerdy hobbies. Was thinking about whether I should get another cat. I was even… genuinely over the whole idea of dating and romance, which is… healthier than the alternative, I swear.”
She pauses. That was… more extremely personal detail than she’d strictly planned to spill to a cybernetic woman she’d had in her brain exactly once. This is why she doesn’t do very many second dates.
Still, she’s… surprised by the Queen’s patient silence: no taunts, no teases, no poking at open wounds. She bites her lip. Wraps the longest loose thread around her pinky finger tight enough she can watch the tip already going red.
“Then this guy walks in—” it feels wrong, even in her own head, calling Picard this guy but she’s already said it. “—with an interesting idea. Do you know how long it had been since someone came to Daystrom and asked me the kind of question I actually used to care about? For an entire hour, someone was giving me an outlet for my life’s work that wasn’t… theoretical and I was crawling through old research and thinking back on some of the best days of my life and— Shit.” She lets out a tiny, choked laugh. “I still remember the absolute tiniest details about that day. What music I was listening to—not getting enough kimchi in my ramen… It was sunny out. I never notice the sun when I’m…”
This time, she does wave a hand, not bothering to fill in depressed.
“Then the fucking director of Starfleet Security comes up to me on my lunch break and just… takes off her tacky sunglasses, reaches over, grabs my face like a football, and— and shoves.” She snaps the thread without meaning to and stares down at it. Blinks too fast, several times in quick succession. Her hands are starting to shake. “It was awful. I mean, immediately. Do you know about it? The admonition?”
“We Borg are aware of the synthetic time capsule on Aia, yes,” she says: no elaboration, no disruption. A part of Agnes wants to poke at that, wants to ask the immediate dozen questions that spring to mind, but she knows why she’d be doing it. So she can stop doing this. And as bad of an idea as it probably is that she’s doing it, she needs to do this.
She takes another deep breath.
“Then you probably know that experience does nothing good to an organic brain. On its own, it’s… hell. And I don’t want to say it isn’t hell for every single person who sees it but—” She clenches her hands into fists, balling up the blanket so hard she can feel its wrinkles warring with the lines on her palms. “—the Commodore did something worse to me. Something it took me… months to understand. It wasn’t just… images of the end of the world, or the fact that she planted them inside me somewhere so deep I’d keep seeing them over and over and over again anytime I even thought about how badly I didn’t want to do what I’d agreed to, or even the fact that I did it. It was— She— She—”
“Agnes,” says the Queen softly, and she flinches, finally looking up. The half-gloved fingers that had been drumming against the cuff are curling idly in her direction. “Come out of the corner, Agnes.”
Part of her wants to flinch. She glares instead.
But her eyes are a little glassy, and a lot tired, and glaring kind of makes her want to cry, so when the Queen adds, “Oh, don’t give me that wounded look, dear. I won’t touch you,” some dazed, disconnected part of her just thinks… well, that’s okay, then.
She takes down the wall of her knees. Stands up, both legs tingling with returning blood. Abandons the blanket on the floor. Crosses the insubstantial barrier of the transporter platform in a few shuffled steps and braces a hand on the console. Levers herself down till she’s sitting again, this time only a few feet away, in front of the controls. In front of the Queen.
“Good enough, I suppose,” she murmurs, then adds, staring directly into Agnes’s upturned eyes, “Commodore Oh tied that vision to exactly what it was you were feeling in that moment. Took those nice, pleasant thoughts you were having and drove a spike right through the middle. Oldest trick in the book.”
Agnes squeezes her eyes shut, entire body twitching. “Yes,” she whispers. “How did you just—”
“I’ve been inside of you, Agnes,” she mutters, and somehow it's missing the teasing edge: it's just true. “Not for as long as we’d both have liked, but I saw several truths about you, including fragments of this one.”
Surprisingly, that brings a kind of relief. What she failed to convey to Mr. Starfleet Therapist in sixteen hour-long sessions, the fucking Borg Queen already knows. It’s a terrible sign for her interpersonal communication skills but it’s also… freeing. If she already knows, there’s no hiding. She can even stand to look at her again; the words come a little easier when she admits, “Then you probably know I’ve had counseling. So much counseling. Counseling is very mandatory when you’re claiming mental manipulation is the reason you killed your ex, but he just… The counselor they stuck me with brushed it off as if every single messed up thing about me could be chalked up to what I’d gone through: seeing the end of the world, killing a man who used to care about me in cold blood, almost witnessing, you know, the extinction of the entire human race at the hands of something that was partially my creation. That stuff.”
Agnes’s smile is watery and awful; the Queen’s not smiling back, but her eyes are disarmingly kind.
“I just kind of had to pretend it was working. The therapy. Or they’d have locked me away in a cell since they couldn’t be sure crazy Doctor Jurati wouldn’t just snap and do it all over again.”
“But it didn’t work,” the Queen prompts softly.
“Of course not. It’s all still there. Something she did to me won’t go away. It’s like… this awful nausea, this physical repulsion I feel every single time I think about… about anything. About Daystrom, about Maddox, about my work, about Soji, about… everything I ever cared about. I can kind of scrape by on a space ship because that whole thing started after she messed with my head but, hell, I can’t even think about ramen anymore. She shoved that awful mess right into the only parts of my brain that knew how to power up one good chemical feedback loop to reward me for still being fucking alive and I—”
Tears are crawling down her face. She doesn’t remember that happening. She clutches at the nearest thing that isn’t flat metal flooring; a single loose cable near her shoe, squeezing it too tightly, betting even if it's attached to anything it’s not like she can hurt the Borg Queen with her bare hands. “The first time I felt anything like myself again was when I plugged myself into you.” She sniffs, hard. “I know you know this, but fuck is that one hell of a drug.” Another ugly laugh.
She quiets. She stares at the cable in her hands: she’s wrapped it in between her fingers. It's solid, unyielding. Slightly warm. “Then you called me cruel today.”
A few seconds pass in silence. “Is that what this is all about,” she murmurs. “I hope you took it as the compliment it was. I enjoyed seeing you like that.”
Agnes’s laugh gets a little more real. She wipes the back of her eyes with her free hand and shakes her head. “Sure. Fine, but… did you, really? That’s what I’ve been hung up on all day. I disconnected, acted like a brat, stormed out of here and… came back and did basically the same thing all over again today, minus whatever good-vibes juice comes from plugging you into my veins. And lemme tell you, without it, I’ve been feeling some new kind of awful on top of the old one because… did I do that to you?”
“Agnes, no,” she answers immediately, but Agnes isn’t done.
“I went into your brain while you couldn’t do anything to stop me and fucked around in there and stole something from you and, I mean, I can’t apologize. Not really. You’re the Borg Queen. You probably deserve it, being strung up there like an especially uninvited house spider after, you know, all the galaxy conquering and mind controlling and mass assimilation and… we needed that data. But how do I know if all I did was… scrounge up the spare change and temporal lint from some side pocket you don’t care about or if I… really screwed up? What if you’re dangling there still looking for a crowbar to pry open the right… neural hatch to get around some important pathway I stomped all over while I was shoveling around in your brain.
“Like, yeah. You’re right. You barely did anything to me in the… what, fifteen seconds before Picard yanked me back out again? But I did. I did it to you. And… fuck. That’s not the kind of cruel I want to be. So yeah. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry I went in and screwed around with your brain without asking, even if it was for your own good. I’m sorry I have to keep you locked out of the ship’s systems like I’m the same me who was keeping you locked up in a glass tube in a lab in the fascist future and I’m sorry that since I can’t exactly let you wander around in here the best I can do is… whatever this is, if you can even call it a conversation.”
Her words have been sharp, well over the edge of sarcasm, but the breath she sucks in through her nose as she winds down is sniffly and awful and she knows, for at least the last five minutes, she’s been talking through angry tears she’s barely felt.
“And I— I don’t think you resent me because I… feel like I would have felt that, somehow? And I don’t think you hate me because you’d probably have gotten my friends killed instead of fixing the transporters today if you did, and…” She trails off, shaking her head. “But I mean, I don’t? Me. I read people about as well as I read ancient Greek, which is to say not at all. I’m no better at knowing what’s going on in your brain than my therapist was at figuring out mine and I— Hey! ”
She cuts herself off with a yelp: the cable in her hand, inert until exactly this second, has twisted up on itself in one fluid motion and coiled halfway up her arm.
“Get up, Agnes,” says the Queen.
She doesn’t wait for an answer. She pulls. When Agnes just stares at her own hand in shock, an extra few cables descend from somewhere behind her back and crawl incautiously towards her with the faint rasp of casing on steel. One catches her other hand; another slips around behind her like an arm about her waist, tugging and nudging at her till she’s up off the floor and stumbling closer, still muttering hey ’s and half-formed protests, but…
When the Queen catches and cradles Agnes’s face in her hand and bends to press a quick, soft kiss to her forehead, Agnes goes dead silent and entirely still. A tiny whimper escapes the back of her throat: half lingering regret, half relief.
“You sweet, impossible thing,” she mutters, staring deeply into her eyes. “You should know I’ve never had someone I’ve shared minds with apologize to me before.”
Agnes lets out a weak, self-deprecating laugh. “See? I’m not Borg material. If you assimilate me I’ll only make you worse. Resistance is futile, sorry ‘bout that. ”
“Hush,” she says, thumbing her lip. “You’re perfect.”
Agnes flushes and shivers, all in one wave from head to toe.
“I hate that anyone touched your mind before me,” she breathes, voice dangerous, low. “If she weren’t several hundred years away from me right now I’d be tempted towards revenge. I’ll have to satisfy myself with… something a little more at hand.”
Fingertips stroke her cheek, then linger near her jaw. A thin, sharp tendril of… something like pleasure, or something like an electric shock, uncoils beneath Agnes’s skin.
She tries to jerk away, remembering, for the first time in too many minutes, how dangerous it is to stand skin-to-skin with a Borg, but it’s too late to pull away. She feels it: a movement of energy through thought, memory, sense-pattern; sees it in her mind’s eye like the arc of electric green light between two halves of a single fractured conduit. Sparks snag deep beneath the surface. She tastes the garlic-and-ginger tang of long-forgotten kimchi on the back of her tongue, spice tingling in the corner of her mouth. Hears a single faint strain of music coiling through the bends of her inner ear. Feels warmth against her cheeks—the urge, despite the dark closeness of La Sirena at night, to close her eyes against Okinawa sunlight.
For a moment, her sight whites out.
Her senses come back like a mis-timed step, a lurch she realizes is her own shoulders heaving with gasped breaths. “W—what—?” she rasps out, and the Queen strokes each of her cheekbones with a thumb, calming and grounding her with slow, steady purpose.
“Our brief time together only masked the damage, my dear,” she says. “Buried it under the euphoria of being me and mine.” The tone is light, but her eyes are serious. “Now it’s gone. Those ugly little tendrils of fear she’d left wrapped around the most beautiful parts of you.” She frowns. “I should have noticed them sooner, if I were less distracted and disconnected from… but, nevermind. All better now.”
Agnes can see it: her own face reflected in the void-black eyes staring down at her, wide-eyed with relief and wonder. She tries to blink it away, blurting out, “I only came back so I could stop feeling guilty all night,” but then adds in a thin whisper, “but I… thank you.”
The memory isn’t gone. If she goes looking, she can still see that sense-shocking vision, play it back like a nightmare, but it’s… distinct. Disconnected. Not knotted around things it has nothing to do with, weighing her down. She feels… loose. Dizzy with a sudden knowledge that gravity is lighter than she remembered.
The Queen slides her fingers up into her hair, combing through it tenderly. “You could never be like her; not with me. Not when I’d so gladly invite you in again.”
At that, Agnes begins to stiffen, trying to claw her walls back up in the face of more familiar games, moving to step back, step away.
“And I will never be like her,” the Queen adds, twin coils tightening around her wrists. “Don’t you see? You’ve given me plenty of opportunity to do my worst here tonight, Agnes. Tell me: what exactly have I done with it?” Her stare is like a little needle, a little mockery, the kind that makes Agnes’s pulse speed up traitorously in her chest. “Only given you back a piece of yourself you were pining away for. No more, no less.”
Another shiver takes her. She stills, no longer pushing back on the restraining grasp of cables against her skin. “Why didn’t you?” she asks.
Hearing it, out loud, she’s not sure if it sounds like a question or a challenge.
The Queen’s hand trails down the side of her neck, skin a touch cooler than her cables. She drags the back of its nails down her left shoulder, one coil loosening from her forearm until it falls away in perfect time with the Queen taking her hand in her own. She turns it, raises it softly to her own lips, and presses a single kiss to the center of Agnes’s palm. “I only want to see you thriving, my dear. No longer wasting away, alone in the midst of this tiny tangle of discordant minds who will never see your potential. Not like I do.”
Agnes’s fingers are trembling, tips grazing the arch of metal implanted in the Queen’s cheek, palm being grazed, every other word, with the slightest brush of lips.
“A beautiful brain,” the Queen murmurs, the cable at her waist tugging her gradually closer. “In a beautiful box.”
If I were sane, she thinks, I would take that as an insult.
But while Agnes Jurati is many things, she’s… probably not that. And instead she’s… laughing, a little hiccupy, a little strange, and… shifting her hand in the Queen’s grasp, tracing a finger up the implant mimicking a cheekbone, then trailing two very slowly along the edges of the row of tiny holes that run from just beside her eye all the way up to the wiring on the back of her head. She stops there, hesitating right before the seam where flesh becomes something else.
She remembers what it feels like, having those wires beneath her skin.
She doesn’t think she’s going to do it until she’s doing it, but her palm flattens out against the back of the Queen’s neck — she tugs, goes up on tip-toes — and freezes for just a second because the Queen’s eyes have fallen idly closed at her touch, a thin, pleased smile curling her lips, and—
She kisses her.
It’s for all of two seconds before Oh shit alarms start going off in the back of her brain, but then the Queen’s own smug little laugh shivers against her lips, and then Agnes is laughing too, and god it feels good to feel it when she laughs, to feel… alive? Delirious? Like she’s a total fucking idiot for doing this but also… happy? Instead of just laughing to cover up the fifty pound nauseous ache inside her that feels nothing at all, and if all of that means Agnes is still crying a little too, well—
The Queen’s lips seem to enjoy following the trails of her tears.