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Candlelight flickered in the draft as Raffi dumped a heavy heap of formalwear onto the small table. Costume jewelry clattered in the quiet of the solarium as she began to rummage through the pile. She was grateful for the distraction; anything to not think about Elnor.
“This is everything Cris managed to lift from the warehouse,” Raffi said, examining a gown's neckline in the warm light before discarding it over the back of a nearby chair. “Though I can’t say he’s got the most refined taste in dresses.”
Seven didn’t reply. Instead she walked past Raffi and toward the imposing windows.
“I told Jurati we’d be done in ten,” Raffi continued, tossing aside another garish sequin number in order to free a flowing red dress from the pile. “She was eyeing this one, but I don’t know.” Raffi held the dress against herself, letting the fabric drape against her figure. “What do you think? Is command red really my colour?” she said playfully, hoping for a reaction from Seven. The ranger had been quiet since they’d arrived.
Seven didn’t answer. She didn’t even turn. Her boots crunched through broken glass and dry leaves as she walked under the dome of the empty glasshouse.
“Maybe gold?” Raffi’s voice faltered as her focus shifted from the dresses in front of her to Seven, who was standing still, staring out at the dark. “You wanna choose something, babe?”
No answer.
Raffi picked up another dress, stared at it for a long moment, and then dumped it back onto the pile and turned back to Seven.
“Y’know, you’re pretty quiet,” Raffi said, turning to the xB. “Did I say something wrong back there or-” She trailed off, and instead followed Seven’s intense gaze up through the broken panes of the solarium. The night sky glittered in the dark of the French countryside.
“Wow.” Raffi let her eyes adjust to the dark beyond the pool of candlelight and took in the scene. “I thought everywhere in this time period would have light pollution like L.A.,” she said and walked over to join her girlfriend, “but the stars are really beautiful out here, huh?”
To Seven, Raffi’s voice sounded distant, quiet. Everything did. Muffled, as if heard from another room. The words took an excruciatingly long time to crystallize into meaning.
“Where, exactly?” Seven finally spoke. Her head moved slowly, eyes scanning the unnervingly empty sky above.
“You’re kidding me, right? There. Those twinkly things,” Raffi wiggled her fingers playfully. When she didn’t get so much as a smile she let the gesture fade awkwardly and folded her arms instead. “Figured you might have heard of them since you wrote the book on astrometrics.”
Seven peered at the night sky through the glass. Cold points of light burned back. Like light through cheap fabric. Like dead pixels.
“Those are… communications satellites.” Seven said, uncertainty creeping into her voice as she struggled to remember the shape of constellations, cold dread settled in her stomach; an icy doubt gripped her chest. “They can’t be–”
Seven tried and failed to command the clusters of scattered light above to form into something more familiar. She scanned the horizon searching for anything that she recognised. Four hundred years of stellar drift shouldn’t be that hard to compensate for, but nothing came to mind. Just disconnected memories of star charts that, when she tried to examine them closer, seemed to evaporate like a dream on waking.
Raffi might have still been talking, she couldn’t be sure.
The stars shivered in the distance, indifferent.
Everything else in this backwards century had a cause for being different, for being wrong somehow. She’d tried to put the constant discomfort down to time travel. To ‘Q powers’ nonsense. She’d tried to dismiss the fact she felt weaker. To shrug off the creeping knowledge that there was so much missing. But this; this was impossible to ignore. A terrifying, yawning void where perfect understanding should be.
“Babe?”
Seven startled at the hand on her back. How had she not heard Raffi move?
“I didn’t even recognise-” Seven began, trying desperately to draw the chaos into order. Grasping for patterns, for certainty, and finding neither. “Why do they look like that? Why do they look like that?” Seven repeated, louder this time, unable to swallow the panic that felt like it was crawling up her throat. She turned to Raffi, a sickening, unmoored twist in her stomach, looking for an answer and finding nothing.
Raffi’s expression was inscrutable.
Worried, maybe?
What did eyebrows knitted together mean?
Seven swallowed hard.
“Raffi, where’s the rest of them?”
“Of what?”
“The stars.” Seven tried to steady her breathing. “They’re wrong.”
Seven willed her pulse slower, but nothing happened. No nanoprobes answered the command to stabilise her cardiovascular function.
No nanoprobes at all.
Just blood. Hot and fast, and getting faster. Drumming deafeningly in her ears.
Just a human heart, wetly beating so hard against her chest that Seven thought it might burst.
Raffi took a step closer. “Seven, I don’t-”
The xB wasn’t listening.
“Where’s… Orion?” She said, uncertainly. Unsure if even that name was right. She looked from window to window. Eyes scanning. Searching. “Why can’t I remember?”
Fear and starlight drained the colour from her face.
“Raffi, why can’t I remember?”
Her eyes settled on three stars that might have been in a row.
“Names of the stars of Orion:” she whispered, as if saying it aloud might make the information come to mind.
“I don’t know-” Raffi started.
“But I should.” Seven spun back to face her. “Or the name of just one?” Seven’s voice hitched, “of any star?”
Her mind scrambled for something easier. Something calmer. Universal.
“How many electrons are in lithium?”
“I don’t know, I-” Raffi stammered.
“Humanity’s species designation?”
“What?”
“Languages? Anything?”
“Slow down, Seven-”
“Anything.” Seven’s voice cracked. “I’m supposed to know-” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I-I can’t breathe.” The crushing pain in her chest felt overwhelming. Worse for having no reliable way to stop it. “There isn’t anything left, Raffi. Don’t you get it?” Seven’s eyes were wide now, panicked. “Everything’s gone.”
“Not gone,” Raffi tried to keep her tone even. “We’ll get back to our timeline and-“
“Not that. Everything.” Seven cut in, pressing her palms against the side of her head as if to keep it from bursting. “Everything.”
“How long have we been here? Seconds? Minutes? How do you gauge that with no chronometric node? I-” She was babbling now, “I normally begin speaking 1.4 seconds after the other person has finished; it’s perceived as the most polite pause. Not interrupting, but not too long. How do you know when to speak?”
“I guess I’ve never really had to think about it.”
“Long range beacon,” Seven touched her collarbone absent mindedly for an implant that wasn’t there. “With a translink frequency. Doesn’t receive anything, not since voyager, not since Kathryn. Just subspace static. But I can feel it’s not there. It’s too quiet.”
“Three million, six hundred thousand nanoprobes.” Seven continued, frantically, eyes screwed tight, as if remembering the figures would offer some safety. “720 nanoprobes per milliliter of blood. Gone. Neural processor? Gone.”
Seven snapped her eyes back to Raffi. “How do you think like this? How can you be certain when an answer isn’t just there straight away?”
“Thoughts just sometimes take a while.”
“Why?” Seven asked genuinely.
“That’s just how it is,” Raffi said, wishing she could come up with a better answer.
“What am I supposed to do? What if we’re stuck here?”
“We won't–”
“What if I’m like this forever? I’m weak.” Seven rubbed her implant-less forearm.
“Babe–”
“And I’m slow.”
“Seven–” Raffi tried to control the growing worry at the edge of her tone.
“I can’t access any of the Collective’s knowledge.” Seven pushed the heels of her palms against her eyes. “I try to think, and there’s just…nothing there.”
“Not nothing–”
“Yes. Nothing!” Seven snapped, desperately railing against how powerless she felt. “I try to verify and I can’t. I try to calculate and I can’t. How can you possibly do anything right with a mind like, like this!”
Seven roughly ran her hands through her own hair, grabbing fist-fulls so violently that Raffi feared it might come loose.
“Like what?!” Raffi threw her hands apart in frustration.
“Human!” Seven roared back, eyes tear-filled and frantic. She made a fist. Loosened it again. For the first time in her life she missed the feeling of the tubules nestled between the bones. “Do you even understand how small you are?”
“Seven,” Raffi looked taken aback.
“How insignificant?” Seven said, face twisted, words dripping with contempt. “How, how petty?”
“This isn’t you, honey.” Raffi gave a shaky smile, trying for reassuring as she reached a pleading hand towards Seven. “I don’t think-”
“You’re right,” Seven cut her off cruelly. “You don’t think. How can you? How can any of you? Walking around with nothing but meat for memory. You’re so fucking proud of being a security expert when you can’t even–“
“Where’s all this coming from?”
“– when you can’t even keep one Romulan kid alive?!” Seven’s voice rose to a shout, its echo ringing harshly off the steel and glass surrounding them.
“Fuck you,” Raffi said bitterly, her tone colder than the empty room.
Raffi had never looked at her like that. Seven took in the look of… was that betrayal?
It hurt, Seven thought, disgusted at herself, at what she’d said.
It deserved to hurt. It deserved to hurt because-
“I couldn’t save him either.” Seven breathed out. Emotional pain so overwhelming she stumbled as her knees gave way.
Raffi scrambled to catch her as she fell, anger giving way to pity as she braced for a weight that wasn’t there. A body not nearly as heavy as she was used to.
“I’m sorry, Raffi. If I’d been faster…” Seven’s head hung between her shoulders, hands pressed against the floor. “If I’d reacted sooner. If I’d done something. Anything.”
Seven’s fingers closed around a shard of glass on the floor. Pain, bright and thin, bit through the skin of her palm.
It hurt, Seven thought, it deserved to hurt.
“Give me that.” Raffi tried to take the xB’s hand.
“No,”
It deserved to hurt.
“Give me that!”
“I won’t comply.”
“I can’t watch you hurt yourself.”
“But I can’t feel anything else!” Seven barked back, visibly recoiling from her own lack of control. “I can’t–”
Seven’s thoughts crashed through a patchwork of half-memories. Disorienting and part-formed. No exact dates or times. No clean edges. Everything blurred, mingling without order.
Voyager , L.A, The Collective, La Sirena , Unimatrix Zero, Vashti, The Artefact. She tried to navigate the chaos in her mind but everything swarmed together.
Content without context. Unclear and unstoppable.
How long had she been here?
Her hand hurt.
Where was here?
Blood welled in her palm.
When was here?
“This…” Seven’s shoulders shook. Her words came slow, painful and deliberate. “This drone is malfunctioning.”
Raffi said something lost to the sound of blood now roaring in Seven’s ears.
“This drone is disconnected.” Seven bent herself over, face pressed to the ground as if in prayer, trying to will the world back into coherence. Trying to block out the memories that poured into each other.
Elnor falling to the ground.
Her parents screaming.
The empty sky.
“I’m scared.” Seven’s voice came at last, small and childlike, and was extinguished by a sob. Followed soon by more.
Raffi’s heart ached in her chest. She swallowed her pride. Unable to be angry with someone so broken. She remembered Gabe as a young boy, and spoke softly. “Can I sit here?”
No answer.
Raffi stepped back to the table and grabbed a dress, taking a moment to find one made of a soft but sturdy material among the slippery satins and sequins. Brushing broken glass to one side with the edge of her boot, she knelt next to Seven.
“I’m going to put my hand on your back, ok?”
Raffi waited for an almost imperceptible nod. She shuffled a little closer, and rested her palm in the small of Seven’s back. The space felt alien in its smoothness. No implants. No metal.
Seven whimpered.
“Let’s fix your hand first, ok?”
A nod.
“Might hurt.”
Raffi tore a strip off the evening dress in preparation, and motioned to take Seven’s hand. She prised open the sticky mess of Seven’s palm and plucked out the shard of glass. Felt her stomach turn as she extracted it from the skin, before flicking the jagged fragment into the dark of the room.
Quickly she wadded the cloth up and pressed firmly to stop the blood flow.
“That’s a start.” Raffi nodded, wondering if Seven could tell how fake her calm really was as they sat in the quiet of the room. The candle occasionally sputtering in the draught through the cracked glass.
Seven lifted her head and watched the blood wick into the cloth. “Healing?”
“I think ‘healing’ is very much stretching it,” Raffi shifted from kneeling to sitting cross-legged. Still applying pressure. “We take a little longer to mend than you’re used to.”
“Cell fragments clogging up the end of broken capillaries?” Seven mumbled. “How human.”
Raffi adjusted her grip on the cloth and Seven grimaced.
“Is that what I am now? Human?”
“Looks that way.”
“Is this what it’s like?” Seven asked weakly. “Is this what it’s like all the time? ” she tried to wipe her eyes, smearing a little blood across her cheek in the process.
Raffi sensed Seven starting to spiral again.
“When we get back home,” Raffi said, matter of factly, clinging to a veneer of calm, “when everything’s back to normal. What will the sky look like?”
“Beautiful,” Seven said, straightening up a little. “Complex. Gravitational wells, chronoton particles, subspace eddies, interconnected everything. Van Gogh got,” Seven paused to think. “He got close. If you substituted the yellow with temporal-field torsion and used your imagination. Good for a human.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally.” Raffi smiled, and checked Seven’s hand. The blood had slowed, and she neatly folded a clean strip of cloth and began bandaging it in place.
Seven smiled weakly, feeling undeserving of the help.
“No wonder you love astrometrics.” Raffi said, glancing up at the broken roof.
“I wonder if Romulus is out there?” Seven thought aloud.“Or Vashti–”
Raffi’s mouth pressed into a line.
“I’m so sorry Raffi.” Seven felt like an idiot. “You’re grieving, and I know you’re grieving. You’re putting on a brave face, and for once I can’t see past it. I’ve spent my whole life using Borg technology to seem human. And now I am. But I’m flying blind. How do you function?”
“Badly, a lot of the time.” Raffi laughed dryly. “But I’m ok.” She paused, and opted for honesty instead. “Well, no. I’m not ok. But I will be. We will be.”
“We?” Seven hazarded, casting a hopeful glance at Raffi’s face, trying to read between the lines of her expression. “I thought maybe I’d blown my chance of ‘we’.”
“I think it’d be unfair to hold you totally responsible for things said while under the influence of being human.”
“Noted.” Seven acknowledged with a weak laugh. “But am I supposed to know what’s real?”
“As much as I’d love to debate Plato’s cave, we’ve got a date with saving the future,” Raffi said. “So for now, how about I be the constant?” She watched thin clouds stretch across the moon.“The stars don’t stop existing just because you can’t see them.” She lay a hand over Seven’s. “And this hasn’t stopped existing because you can’t see it right now.”
Seven cocked her head a little.
“That’s the face you make when you’re listening to my heartbeat,” Raffi said, knowingly.
“Observing micro-fluctuations in skin temperature,” Seven corrected.
“Whatever,” Raffi waved, “Crash course in non xB perception. For as long as we’re here, this…” She squeezed Seven’s good hand. “... means ‘I got you’, ok? And this is ‘it’s gonna be ok’.” Raffi slid her thumb softly over Seven’s knuckles.
The xB nodded stoically, trying to commit that to memory.
“Is this helpful?” Raffi hesitated.
Seven nodded again.
“Ok, how about, er, admiration,” Raffi gently tucked a strand of hair behind Seven’s ear.
Seven met her gaze, held it desperately, as if it were a lifeline.
Raffi’s thumb grazed the xB’s cheekbone, eyes searching Seven’s own for a hint of thaw.
“And what’s that?” Seven asked, holding Raffi’s hand to her cheek.
“Reverence?” Raffi wondered aloud. Realising if it was hard for her to put a name and emotion to a gesture, then how insurmountable must it feel for Seven right now. She thought of the chaos of the last few days, the pain and the loss. She couldn’t imagine doing all that and wrestling with becoming human after a lifetime of being something else.
“Trouble deciding?” Seven prompted.
“Trouble putting it into words,” Raffi admitted, before settling on, “This is… that feeling when I realise that, that I’m with you. Seven of Nine. And I take that in. Really think about it. About you. About us. Disbelief maybe? Respect? Awe?” Raffi paused to feel the grandiose word on her tongue.
“Yeah,” She finally admitted. “Awe.”
Seven looked unconvinced.
“Look. Even while down to bare bone processing power you casually referenced a 500 year old artist and temporal-field torsion. While crying.” Raffi smiled and shook her head gently in disbelief. “Who does that? You’re not not a genius, even as a human.”
Seven glanced down between their knees at the dead flowers amongst the grit. At the fine lacework of roots echoing the implants she lacked.
“Do I at least look human?”
“Oh honey,” came Raffi’s reply.
Seven felt gently fingers tuck her hair behind her ear, followed by the slow stirring of human short term memory.
Hair tucked behind ear.
Admiration.
Seven looked up to meet her lover’s gaze, as the pad of Raffi’s thumb glanced across where the root of her implant should begin.
Thumb grazing cheekbone.
Reverence.
Awe.
Raffi softly kissed her tear stained cheek. “You look like you.”
Seven reflexively raised an eyebrow.
“See what I mean?” Raffi smiled.
Seven smiled too, despite herself.
“We’re going to make it through this, understand?” Raffi pushed herself up from the floor, offered a hand to Seven, and pulled her up.
She dusted the detritus from her knees and straightened up, “We’re gonna fix the timeline. Get Elnor back. Get out of this backwater century, and you can go back to using whatever xB magic lets you track my heartrate in the bedroom.”
“You use humour to mask your fear,” Seven observed, as if appreciating it for the first time.
Raffi shrugged. “And you state the obvious when you’re uncertain.”
Seven reflexively straightened her back. It felt familiar. “Clarity brings me comfort.”
“Spoken like a true scientist,” Raffi smiled.
“Are you guys done yet?” Rios’ uncertain voice carried down the empty hall. Seven wondered how much he’d heard.
“Shit. Right. Yes. Small bit of infiltrating a high security gala,” Raffi muttered. “Give us a second?” she shouted back. “Speaking of which…” Raffi plucked a dress from the pile.
“How about Science Officer blue?” Raffi held up the dress to Seven. “Would look good on you.”
“Raffi?” Another impatient shout from Rios. “Agnes says she wants the red one.”
Raffi laid the red dress to one side and gathered some jewelry. “Here,” she said and squeezed a clutch of heavy bracelets onto Seven’s wrist.
The xB smiled softly. The metal felt familiar.
“The stars really do look beautiful.” Raffi turned to take in the night sky. Soft light whispering the patterns of the glass onto the floor. Stars the same as they always were. She turned to Seven. “And you look beautiful too.”
“We’re gonna get through this,” Raffi promised. She squeezed Seven’s hand.
“I got you, too” the xB nodded.
“Ok.” Raffi nodded back. “Then let’s go save the world.”