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It’s the headache that wakes her, but the voices that get her out of bed. Raffi pushes herself upright, groaning as she plants her elbows on her knees and drops her head into her hands. She hasn’t heard voices on this ship in months. Not since she turned off the holos. So either she’s hallucinating and that drug was way worse than she thought, or someone is on her ship. Someone who isn’t supposed to be.
Pain chews into her eyeballs as she tries and fails to remember if she hid everything that could blow her cover any worse than it’s already blown. Not that she has a lot of mementos lying around—she’s not that careless. But this is a long assignment, and she’s gotten lonely, and with the loneliness comes sentimentality, and everyone knows that when a spy gets sentimental, they get sloppy. Raffi hates being sloppy.
And gods does her head pound.
The voices grow louder—two of them, maybe three. Raffi lifts her head and listens. No, just two. In the engine room. The third is from a newscast they’re either watching or have forgotten to turn off.
Well okay then. Just make yourself at home.
She stands—not without effort—and grabs her phaser from the bedside table. Catwalks out of her quarters past the cargo bay, back to the blood-red glow of the engines where her guests aren’t arguing so much as bickering. About a…bat’leth? And the good bloodwine flagons? What the fuck?
“I don’t know who the hell you are,” Raffi starts, stepping into the light with phaser raised, “but—”
As the d’k tahg thwips into the deckplates between her feet, she knows she shouldn’t look down. Knows it’s a distraction meant to redirect her attention so she’s more easily disarmed. Raffi knows. But she’s groggy, she’s tired, and she just got her ass kicked by one of the meanest drugs on the street. At the end of the day, she’s only human. She looks down.
When she looks up again it’s into the barrel of her own phaser.
She doesn’t even try to fight. Later, that will be the thing that haunts her. She just fucking stands there, frozen, all her neural pathways—her instincts—shot to hell by this stupid drug. She has just enough time to apologize to Elnor and JL and Seven in her head, and then—
The click and whine of the weapon powering down. Warm metal in her hands. The ability to focus on the face behind the phaser—weathered, white-haired, Klingon. A not-quite grin.
“I am Worf,” he says. “Son of Mogh. House of Martok. Son of Sergey. House of Rozhenko. Bane of the Duras family. Slayer of Gowron. And she is my ex-wife.”
Raffi’s eyes swivel to the figure standing several paces to her right.
“Oh, wow. Thanks so much,” the woman says, folding her arms and lifting her eyebrows into her spotted hairline. “I have a name, you know.”
Worf ignores her and turns back to Raffi. “I have made some chamomile tea. Do you take sugar?”
Raffi blinks.
“Jadzia,” the woman says as she drops a little curtsey even though she’s dressed in pants and knee-high boots and a sweater not unlike the ones Seven likes to wear. “Jadzia Dax.”
The room was kind of already spinning, but it spins even harder now. A spiraling lurch out from her stomach and into her still-shaking limbs. “Wait. Jadzia Dax ? And Worf? Y-you’re legends. Picard used to talk about you all the time. I mean he talked about Worf—I heard about you through the Starfleet grapevine,” she says, shooting Jadzia at look. She turns back to Worf. “You’re exactly as I imagined you to be. Well. Mostly.”
At the console, Worf pours his tea and sips it almost daintily. “I have learned of late that one must access calm as much as fire. So I have been, as humans say, working on myself.”
Jadzia rolls her eyes.
A wave of pain slams into Raffi’s forehead. She closes her eyes and grips the bridge of her nose. “Fuck. This headache blows.”
“I told you not to engage,” Worf rumbles.
“And I told him to tell you to keep engaging, but I didn’t mean like this. Gods and sunlight, Raffi, Splinter? Really? What were you thinking?”
Raffi opens her eyes and blinks a few times. Wonders if she really is hallucinating. “Who are you? I mean, I know who you are, but what are you doing on my ship?”
“We’re here to help,” Jadzia says at the same time Worf repeats his offer of tea. Jadzia sighs and plants her hands on her hips. “Would you stop it with the tea? She’s clearly not interested.”
Raffi rubs her temples, pushing past the drug’s needling ache. “The last thing I remember, that Ferengi was going to kill me.”
Worf steps away from the console. “It was not your time to join the dead.”
That gets her attention. “You’re my handler?”
“Handlers,” Jadzia corrects.
“You’re with Starfleet?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Raffi looks between them. Worf presses his lips together and stands up a little straighter. “Our interests align with theirs.”
“It’s complicated,” Jadzia adds.
“Yeah, well. I’m beginning to suspect that’s just your thing.”
“Think of us as subcontractors.”
“He’s a subcontractor. I’m just here to have some fun by keeping his ass in line.”
“Jadzia—”
“All right!” Raffi hisses. “All right. Just. Stop bickering. Clearly I’ve stumbled into something I have no business being involved in.”
“I am glad to see you are coming around to my point of view.”
“I meant whatever the hell is going on between you two.” Raffi scoffs and starts to leave the room. “I don’t have time for this.”
“There is something coming,” Worf calls after her. “Some kind of attack.”
She whirls. “There was an attack. At the recruitment center, using stolen weapons from Daystrom. I fucking told you that.”
“Yes, but we’re worried it’s the start of something much larger,” Jadzia interjects.
“That’s what I told you,” Raffi yelps, lifting and clenching her fists. “So why would you order me to disengage when I’m obviously right?”
“Because,” Worf rumbles, stepping forward, a foreboding mass of muscle and frowning disapproval, “I thought you would get yourself killed, or nearly so. And I too was obviously right.”
Raffi closes her eyes (this headache) and turns around, grunting a little as the movement sends another blade scything through her brain.
“Withdrawals,” Jadzia murmurs, placing a hand on her arm.
“Yes, from the narcotic you ingested in your eye before I saved your life,” Worf adds.
“You blew my cover!”
“You had already accomplished that yourself.”
Raffi makes a frustrated noise and drops down onto a storage bin, gripping the sides of her head.
“Raffaela—”
“Would you just—”
“Worf.” Jadzia’s voice cuts through their clamor. “Back off for a minute. She’s been through hell.”
“She would not have—”
“Worf.”
He growls, but even though Raffi’s got her eyes closed, she can sense the unspoken conversation going on above her head.
“Fine. One half hour. Then we continue.”
Continue with what? Raffi wants to ask, but Worf’s steel-toed boots are already clomping away from them and toward the bridge. She digs the heels of her palms into her eyes and bites back another groan. “Why do I do this? My life. My family. My sobriety. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
Silence—(not that she expected an answer)—and then the hum of the replicator a dozen feet away. She lifts her head as Jadzia sits down beside her and holds out a steaming mug. “Raktajino’s not really my thing.”
“Try it,” Jadzia urges. “My own recipe, refined across multiple lifetimes in pursuit of curing a range of hangovers. I only share it with friends.”
“We’re not friends.”
“No. But I hope we will be. Someday.”
Raffi takes the mug. If nothing else, the heat feels good in her hands. She presses her cheek to the hot ceramic and studies her handler. One of her handlers. Jadzia Dax. A legend, though it’s been years since Raffi heard any of the Dominion War heroes’ names. Most of them seemed content to disappear in the aftermath of all that, settle down, make lives for themselves. At the time, she hadn’t understood it. But she’d been so young back then. So tired of desk duty, of staying planetside, of having to choose between work and family when all she wanted was to do her job.
Jadzia leans forward and clasps her hands between her knees. “How’s your head?”
“Worse. Which I didn’t think was possible.”
“I’ll get you an analgesic in a minute. In the meantime, that should help.” She gestures to the drink, and Raffi takes a dutiful sip. It isn’t bad. Just very sweet and very strong. And is that— “Jacarine peel,” Jadzia confirms. “An old friend’s addition.”
“I’m guessing that old friend is another legend.”
Jadzia smiles, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Something like that.”
She takes another sip. “Well it’s good.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said that.”
Silence, during which the pounding in Raffi’s temples fades a generous amount. She looks at Jadzia—the soft slope of her shoulders and the easy crook of her legs, the gray hair caught up halfway in an intricate braid and the rest curling gently against her collarbones. “I can’t believe you’re my handler. I learned about you in school.” She doesn’t realize she said it out loud until Jadzia looks at her, eyes twinkling.
“Technically, this is Worf’s op. I’m just here to help.”
“Help handle me?” Raffi laces the words with sarcasm, but Jadzia’s expression stays soft.
“No. Help handle him. He can get intense.”
“I noticed.”
“And with that intensity comes a certain tunnel vision. Helpful when it needs to be, but can just as easily harm. He feels bad for keeping you under this long.”
Raffi looks down at her mug. “I knew what I was signing up for.”
“Maybe. But knowing something in the abstract is very different from experiencing it.” A small pause. “For what it’s worth, he never thought it would take this long.”
Raffi laughs into her drink—a sharp, hollow sound. “Story of my life.” She rolls the raktajino around on her tongue for a while before swallowing. “You two seem to get along well. You know, in between all the bickering.”
Again, that sly smile, those eyebrows lifted high. “What can I say? We like each other.”
“Just not enough to stay married.”
Jadzia gives her a look, and Raffi lifts a hand. “Okay, okay. Point taken. I guess I’m just surprised, is all. Getting my ex to work with me was like pulling teeth.”
“Worf is a very dear friend and an absolutely dreadful partner, and I’m sure he’d say the same of me. But we work well together, when we’re not, you know, trying to make one life out of it. Easier to come and go.”
Raffi purses her lips and nods, eyes fixed on the dregs of her coffee.
“How is Seven, anyway?”
“First of all, that’s a personal question. A bit too personal. Second of all, you know we haven’t talked in months due to the, y’know, whole undercover thing. I have an image to maintain.”
“I also happen to know you’re a world-class hacker who’s been breaking into planetary surveillance systems to spy on your granddaughter.”
Raffi scowls. “It’s really not fair how much you know about me.” Jadzia blinks and smiles prettily, waiting. Raffi sighs. “Fine, okay, maybe I broke into the ship’s logs a few times and read some…coded messages. So court-martial me. You think I like leaving her to fend for herself?”
“Probably as much as she likes leaving you to fend for yourself in the criminal underworld,” Jadzia muses.
Raffi clamps her mouth shut and resists the urge to point out that the difference between what she’s doing and what Seven’s doing is that no one had to talk Raffi into going back to being a spy. Seven, however, took a great deal of convincing to join Starfleet. Convincing in which Raffi played a not insignificant role.
Jadzia inhales and sits up straighter. “Well. The bad news is, there’s a much bigger plot going on than we first thought. The good news is, we’re closing in on it. And the sooner we get you out of here—”
“The sooner I can go kick that lily-white captain’s ass. Yeah, I know.”
Jadzia chuckles, and Raffi’s shoulders relax. How long has it been since she’s heard genuine laughter? Laughter directed at one of her jokes? Gods, it’s been a long assignment.
She sets her mug aside just as Worf clomps into the room. “It has been thirty minutes. I trust you have sufficiently recovered from your near death on a mission that everyone told you you should not work.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Raffi gripes. “Pile it on. I’ve heard worse from bigger legends than you.”
She returns his glare until Worf’s glower softens into something almost like pride. “You have the heart of a warrior. And the instincts. You have served me well.”
Her stomach clenches. “Hey. Where is all this past tense coming from? I am not done here and I do not need a babysitter. I’ve been undercover for months. I have my finger on the pulse—”
“Raffi,” Jadzia murmurs, fingers soft on her knee. “We know who paid the Ferengi to lie. A human by the name of Titus Rikka. Multiple criminal underworld contacts.”
Worf straightens, a gleam in his eye. “The three of us. We will track this individual together. And then we will find out who stole those weapons, learn the next phase of their plan, and stop them.” He doesn’t wait for a response, just turns and marches out of sight, mek’leth gleaming across his shoulders as he goes. Raffi blinks.
“He doesn’t say that to just anyone, you know. The warrior line. Take it from someone who’s known him for thirty years. He’s impressed.”
She stands and holds out her hand, which Raffi stares at for entirely too many seconds before realizing Jadzia’s offering to help her up.
A mission. With Worf, son of Mogh. And Jadzia fucking Dax. Raffi opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again, lips twitching up into a tiny smile. “Cool.”