Work Text:
You lie to Sidney La Forge.
“It’s over,” you tell her, your Borg hand cradling her human head, the pronoun you just spoke purposefully nebulous, unclear, lacking an antecedent.
The xBs call what she’s going through “Third Time,” with First Time as before assimilation, Second Time as Borg, Third Time as a transition — euphoria, disorientation, yearning for connection, disconnection, belonging — and Fourth Time as an xB.
So Sidney La Forge is in Third of Fourth Time but so is most of the crew and you can’t hold them all, can’t cradle all their heads the way you do hers — Icheb, you can see Icheb, the curves and angles of his face, the gleam of his ocular implant — so you lie, a lie of omission because Second Time is over and Fourth Time hasn’t yet begun and the memory-echo of Icheb’s face seems contemplative — toward you? toward Sidney? — and your Borg hand cradles her head that’s not solely human anymore but isn’t yet xB.
Because to tell the truth — that it will never be over, that there is no Fifth Time of acceptance and comfort and ease, that her life will never “return to normal,” that the stomach-gnawing questions of fault and blame and guilt and humanity will never go away — would be unnecessarily cruel.
Not to Sidney. Not yet.
To yourself.