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You’re worried.
To be fair, you can’t remember a time when you aren’t worried about something or other. Even tucked away in the humble cabin adjacent to Chateau Picard with your sleeping lover tucked gently into the curve your sleeping body makes, you feel the needles of anxiety prick at your fingers and drag across the arches of your feet.
Your midwinter shivers feel more like convulsions, but she still doesn’t wake. You send a silent prayer to God that she stays asleep considering she hasn’t slept an entire night in years for one reason or another. Before, she was anxious about the synth ban. Now, she’s perpetually mourning a reality that’s been dashed away. Either way, something has been taken from her and you’re the only consolation prize in sight.
Icheb.
His name is whispered in the dark hours of the night and written obsessively in her diary that you’re only briefly privy to. You know that he existed but that’s the extent of it. Starfleet has erased his history and Bjayzl took care of his future. The only people who remember him have all but abandoned Seven in the wake of a new Federation. Sometimes she indulges you with little anecdotes about parenting a teenager who was figuring out the world at the same time as her. It’s a blessing and a curse, but aren’t most things in life?
So, you lay in the bed, arms around a sleeping Seven, and pretend that the angry way your heart beats is from too much coffee and not the constant worry that Seven is going to crumple under the pressure of it all. You’re worried, but you’re also resentful. It makes you feel guilty. Everything makes you feel guilty. The way she can’t quite smile when you call her beautiful and the way she tenses when your hands roam her inorganic parts. Someone took that joy from her and you can’t decide if it was an ex-lover hell-bent on disassembling her family like a phaser rifle or the Queen who wanted to sire as much power as she could. So many people have taken from her that you’ve had to teach her how to receive without fear. That it itself is a match made in Purgatory considering you should have lived your life with a little more fear.
The mornings are the best - stolen kisses and lazy fingers on hips. She’s especially affectionate after a bout of nightmares, which makes you incredibly uncomfortable but you deal with it. She’s coping - you’re both coping, with a reality without both of your sons.
You ponder this in the harrowing moments when the house is quiet and your communicator is turned as loud as it will go. She’s off doing something or other under the guise of being a vigilante and you’re nursing a cup of tea that you barely tolerate. The distance is a necessity considering how independent you both are. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, yes, but yearning makes the heart beat louder.
Can you grieve a son you never officially had or should you leave that for ones you had and then abandoned? Gabe has all but erased you from the family tree and Elnor can’t look at you without being reminded of his successes falling through his tips in wispy mists. It’s not the same, but the little boy-shaped holes in both of your hearts are still gaping wounds that fester with each rotation around the sun. You have a son and she doesn’t. There’s resentment. From both of you. What you wouldn’t give to at least see him one more time, even if it was to put him out of his misery.
The bottles taunt you and the clatter of Seven’s pills are an alluring siren’s song. It’s tempting sometimes, to let it all go to hell again and again. You know she’ll forgive you - she always does. You’re “trying” and “having a hard time” each time you feel the pull. She’ll explain away anything you do, but you don’t trust yourself to toe that edge. It’s too easy to manipulate her and the fact that you see that already means you’re a shitty person. Only this time you want it to work, so you swallow the impulses and sit on your hands. You need this one to stick. You love her; she loves you. It’s finally enough to silence the raging impulses in your head. Though when the leaves change from green to warm tones and eventually freeze away, you wonder if you’re enough to quell hers.
Days pass and nights are long. All of their birthdays pass in a flurry of remorse and tear-stained cheeks. Soon you wake up and she’s across the bed, sleeping soundly. It’s becoming more and more of a thing. The distance doesn’t hurt, but you swallow jealousy that she’s changing, evolving. Will she need you when she’s finally formed?
She sleeps through the night now and it only hurts you a little bit. How dare you miss her clinginess when it stemmed from her loss and longing. Loss of a child,- a childhood for her as well. Longing for a family that doesn’t exist anymore. Longing for the peace and tranquility of being a single mind in a buzzing hive of millions. Her parents are dead and so is the Queen. You sometimes wonder if she considers the Queen her legal guardian because she was part of Seven’s life longer than anyone else has been. Where do you fall in the funnel cloud of abandonment and heartbreak? You hope on everything that’s divine that you are the sun and she uses you to find her way in the dark. But she’s locked up tighter than any lock you’ve picked so you wait. You wait until she’s ready.
The nights are now calmer but the days are rough. It hurts but you know it means progress so you deal with what you can. She doesn’t need you anymore, but she wants you. It’s taken years and lots of therapy, but you finally understand the difference. Needs and wants are not synonymous but when it comes to love, it has been. You both need to work on yourselves, but somehow it seems more achievable with her by your side. Her metallic fingers and perpetually quirked eyebrow have someone wiggled into your heart and fallen asleep. It’s invigorating, it’s comfortable.
Perhaps one day you’ll wake up to impish giggles and little girls with hair like yours and eyes like hers, but those days are far off. Sometimes they feel so far off that you reckon they’ll never come to fruition. However, instead of the desolate future, you knew, you have a future that you’ve made.
A future with her, in spite of all the bullshit life has tossed her way. You can’t quite say the same - you are the catalyst to all of your own issues.
So, you live and you learn and hope and pray that no matter what happens that she keeps on trying. Trying to move past what’s been done to her and focus on what she’s capable of. Trying to maintain a sense of inner peace now that the threats to her humanity are gone. Oh, the possibilities she has. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. But most of all?
It’s here and it’s now.