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There’s a lot to unpack, being alone on La Sirena. Alone is relative, of course. She has a couple corpses, several options of former acquaintances she can plug-n-play into the hologram generator, and an entire second person in her head.
But she hasn’t been back here since she killed that second person with a borrowed antique shotgun and a lot of complicated feelings, and right on up until she took off, she was focused on the struggle—both of them: the one the Queen was having to defeat her friends and reclaim the ship and fly off to assimilate the galaxy, and the one she was having, to stop her.
Now, as she sets the autopilot and paces away from the flight systems, she’s alone in a ship full of ghosts and memories. There, that spot where Seven’s blood still slicks the floor. There, that crate sitting ajar from when she flung Raffi against it. There, the door where she last transported into the ship and faced a fleeing Rios dragging along some makeshift family he’s already acquired after just a few days in this messy past, and felt nothing.
Here, only a few steps further, where she shot the Queen.
Here, where she watched her strangle a man she didn’t know with limbs she can already feel growing and forming under her own skin, strange materials displacing organs she no longer needs, preparing her for battles she knows, despite her best intentions, she’ll soon have to fight.
Here, where she first tasted the bite of assimilation euphoria, fast and hot and deadening of all other senses when it flooded her veins.
Here, where she first brought a tortured, torturous being onboard a stolen Confederation vessel, plugged her in, looked up into her eyes and thought… Wow.
“We were both doomed from the start.”
Again, she looks up into the Queen’s familiar gaze, standing right where she’d spent all those dangling hours, watching and waiting for her prey to come too close. “I didn’t think we’d do this anymore,” she admits.
The Queen shrugs, tilting her head, studying her. “You’re the one who chose this, Agnes. You wanted to test out the impact of retained individuality on our pursuit of perfection. There you are, here I am.”
But when she looks at herself reflected in a blurry smear in the nearest silver surface, a hatch-wall barely more reflective than it is dull, she sees only what they’re becoming. She touches her own cheek, surprised she can’t feel the circuitry the way she would veins, as dark and prominent as it is against her skin. “Am I still here?” she asks, and probably she’s asking her other half, but it's her own reflection she’s still facing, studying, trying to understand.
The Queen answers, “Yes,” though. Too easily. Agnes shoots her a look. “You’re changing in ways I don’t have to,” she says idly. “But you’re still rather hopelessly you. I won’t pretend it didn’t occur to me to cave on this, then take what I wanted once I had you alone, but you’ve learned the tricks of it too quickly. I don’t think I’d win.”
She offers one of her pleased little smiles as if to say, I don’t take it personally. Her hand joins Agnes’s where it rests on her cheek, stroking the back of her fingers, then trailing away, following the black lines down the column of her throat, across to the latticework stain on her chest. “You’ll get used to this,” she says, voice soft. “I’ve been careful.”
Agnes lets her hand drop back to her side. Looks up slowly at the particular ghost who is so much more solid than the rest. “What do you mean?”
The Queen’s touch lingers just above the neckline, idly following the thickest band in an irregular loop around an inch-wide patch of skin. “Decoration,” she murmurs. Her black eyes blink slow. “Someday, you’ll need more, if you want to keep this body alive, but for now… it would be a shame to damage it.”
There’s something in her voice that’s familiar. Agnes digs backwards through thoughts, feelings, looking for things she’s felt the edges of, but not yet come to understand.
What she finds, first, is Seven. Seven as she was in the hive—then Seven as she was aboard Voyager: reclaimed for humanity, humanity reclaimed. Seven then—Seven now—wearing bits of her past belonging like chains when, through other eyes, they are so clearly ornamentation, a mark of certain freedoms from organic constraint. An excruciatingly personal regret, disappointment, at something lost blurs the edges of her friend into something far more complicated when shared between them, something she knows will make it hard to look at her if she ever sees her again, then— she’s gone. Replaced by a woman Agnes recognizes from Seven’s past: fiery red hair—no, silver-white—no, red again: a wayworn ship, a sharp-tongued game, a brief euphoria of sinking into her throat, flooding her mind, looking at her fragile, lovely form and thinking I’d keep her like this, for a little while before—
An end she doesn’t linger on. Other moments are more distant, fragmentary, but there is a theme. A continued frisson of interest, a covetous thread snapped and retied a thousand times, as a Queen stares at other forms of organic connection and thinks, If only we were not so feared that we could not have these as well.
She emerges still prickling with thoughts and feelings of ulterior desire, sees herself for a brief moment entirely through the Queen’s eyes: desirable in dozen ways, more, in ways she wouldn’t have had words for were she not now in possession of the assimilated knowledge of species who connect in ways infinitely different than the human own.
She sees the bruisings of color beneath her skin and thinks she’s painted me, and her lower lip is trembling with an emotion she’s too overwhelmed to name.
“We were both doomed from the start,” she whispers, echoing the words as though she’s spoken them before.
She could never have looked into someone’s eyes who saw her like this, and turned away.
Certain thoughts come with such perfect harmony that everything else quiets, the haunt of their stolen ship barely a ripple around the perfect stillness where something has fallen into place. She looks at it and sees each moment as an inevitability, not a regret. She starts to see the shapes of strands of the future shifting and twining at their command. She strokes her own cheek and doesn’t need to see the Queen projected beside her to know it’s her touch, her care, which paints and brands and soothes her in equal intentional parts.
She understands, for the first time, how well she chose her own offer. Strange to think of it this way, but it’s… a gift. An exploration of interconnection in the thousand thousand ways she’s coveted with a curiosity that had no place in an era of absolute conquest. It’s a gift brimming with so vast a possibility it sparks thoughts rife with each and every one of those shared, complex words in the both of them: hope, fear, love.
Futility, however, is conspicuously absent. As all-but-touchable as these wisps of possible futures are, they hold commonality only with each other, not with the thousand past futures they have left behind. There’s no sense of end, not yet, and that wide open horizon of the what if of the what is of what may yet be brings with it a certain sense of powerlessness the Queen does not enjoy. If every future is possible, none of them are yet within her control.
No, Agnes resists the urge to turn back to the tree they know, the one which branches primarily from futility and fear; its intertwined branches, as lovely and hauntingly seductive as they may be, limited by the rot at its root. “If every future is possible, all of it is within our control,” she says, feeling her own eyes flick black, then human, then black again. She struggles with the limits of her own mind to focus on hope: on what it might feel like to be a part of something as euphoric as complete, willing connection.
It’s easy, she’s shocked to realize. Because she’s already experienced it here, with her. More times that she could admit before there was no one to hide from. Not just now, at the end, but the first moment those pale fingers caressed her cheek and slipped herself inside her skin. Not just then, when she was ostensibly preserving the future, but earlier still, when she felt the Queen slip past her own probing, repairing thoughts and into her own mind, seeking out bits of her she’d always kept carefully locked away, lifting them, measuring them, weighing them and deciding: yes, we’d like to have these for our own. She drifts, for a quiet moment, in those memories. Lets them fill her, focus her, charge her with purpose.
She can picture the immediate future in a way that never came easily to her as a human being whose brain chemicals worked against her on the daily. She can imagine La Sirena ’s last dark memories replaced with new ones: long idle and introspective days adjusting to their shared existence, working together to find or create everything they need to survive the journey, stretching her brain in her own field of study in a way she hasn’t since leaving Coppelius—dissecting the changes beneath her own skin with every ounce of curiosity she suppressed when she wished she could study the Queen, thinking of ways to adapt them to their new mission, maybe even coming so far she can repair one ( or both) of the bodies in preservation in the morgue. Seeing parts of the galaxy even the Queen has never seen. Welcoming their first companions.
Reuniting, in a future that is not so vast and unknowable as all that, with the friends that have only just now let them go.
That itch, that consumptive panic the Queen has been trying to conceal from her since making this deal, recedes. It’s not gone. After all, to a being who has known the end that was always coming in hundreds of thousands of realities and timelines, what is gaining hope against losing certainty?
“It’s… better,” the Queen admits, appearing behind Agnes with her hands resting on her shoulders, staring out a viewport she can’t remember walking to, facing out into the endless star-streaked night. “The futility of others became our weapon because we saw how effective it had always been when working against our own. It served us well enough. However—” Her hand slides down over the bump of Agnes’s collarbone, rests, flat-palmed, over her heart. “—we have used the promise of hope and love to much the same effect.”
A flurry of near-past memories skate across the surface of Agnes’s mind. Imagine, being loved, completely…
“I will not allow us to become weak with it,” she adds, voice a dull, hard-edged drawl near her ear, the briefest threat of intangible nails dragging against her skin before, just as quickly, she softens. “But I’ve accepted your… gift, dear.” Her thumb rolls slowly back up a tendon in her throat, pressing a little harder when she crosses the densest patches of black. “Now you have to accept mine.”
The Queen blanks the view with a mental command, replacing it with a real holographic mirror—no more blur from staring at herself in the hazy walls. There she is—there they are—with her same blond curls, her same pale skin, her same thousand-year stare somewhere behind eyes that always look like they’re trying to smile, but haven’t quite learned how. Doctor Agnes P. Jurati, the Earth’s leading expert on synthetic life. (If she tried to say it aloud right now, she’s not sure if it would make her laugh, cry, or both.) It’s her, but… it isn’t. Her lips are the lips of a stranger: utterly bloodless, pale. Her skin is rippled through with intricate circuitry, stained with the trespass of nanoprobes beneath her skin. She knows, with one command, tendrils could emerge from her wrists, her palms; cables from her shoulders or skull; thick, prehensile limbs from the base of her spine. She can feel it—spinal plating, once a piece of her uniform now integrated for ease of interface with systems she hasn’t built, but remembers in a way that makes a little shiver run up the exposed silver column, fluttering each vertebra, her entire body minutely curling and flexing and stretching back her shoulders with it, the thought of even more electricity and power in her veins.
For a moment, she sees it: the smile in her eyes is real.
She looks at herself and considers… yeah. She has to change in ways the Queen doesn’t. She has to let go of certain bits of her past, has to learn to look at her old face with her new decoration and still see herself in her changing skin, but isn’t that just… the most organic thing of all? To exist, to live, is to change and recognize yourself in the unrecognizable you are, every day, becoming.
The Queen has to change in ways she doesn’t. Huge, century-spanning ways. It’s…
“Not a balanced trade,” she murmurs, pressing an unexpected kiss to Agnes’s temple as she lets her go. “But one I’ll call fair.”
Agnes turns to look for her, reaching out a hand, but finds the bridge once again empty of anything but ghosts. She shivers, reaching up, tracing a hand down a bit of her throat where she still feels a lingering touch.
Still a lot to unpack, alone on La Sirena.
But alone is relative, of course.