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“Let me go,” Raffi says, far too calmly, without even a trace of panic in her voice. But then, this isn’t her first rodeo.
She’s keeping her head up, eyes hard and focused intently on Seven’s face. She’s moving easily with the man at her back, despite her considerable strength and combat training. The man who scoffs loudly, assures Raffi he’ll do no such thing.
“Let me go,” Raffi says, nodding slightly. “Sseulaiin.”
Seven’s never been one for taking orders without question, but this is Raffi.
Raffi lets herself be half dragged a few more feet toward the exit, and Seven — though visibly frustrated — does as she’s been asked. Holsters her weapon, whole body rigid with visible frustration, a flood of adrenaline and cortisol and the overwhelming pressure of her blood rising like bile in her throat screaming for her to move.
The last thing Raffi sees before she’s out the door is Seven, eyes closed and eerily still.
*******
“We’re never doing that again,” Seven says firmly, eyes cast down as she cycles through a few settings on the dermal regenerator until she finds the one for human fascia and tendons.
They’d made a few upgrades to Sirena’s medbay — one of which was in Seven’s hands now — that, given the nature of their line of work, had proven well worth the effort. Raffi sits up on the bed, shifting until she’s no longer blocking the light over her thigh and reaching for the scissors.
“What? Why not? Everything went perfectly according to plan.”
Raffi finishes cutting the right leg of her slacks open, sighing at the instant sense of relief. The swelling had gotten bad fast, and she’d made the choice — a mistake, she thinks now — of wearing tighter clothes when getting dressed this morning. Hindsight is 20/20, after all.
“Yeah, including that part where I had to let you get dragged into a dark alley at phaser point by one of the galaxy’s most ruthless arms dealers.”
If Seven had ever gotten the chance to be an obstinate teenager, Raffi imagines she would’ve sounded something like she does right now.
Raffi tries to straighten out her leg, then tries to hide her wince. She’s about equally successful at both endeavors. So her meniscus is definitely torn.
“You didn’t think I could handle him? Raffi’s teasing, but there’s an undercurrent of concern in her tone now that earns her a raised brow implant.
Seven shifts her weight onto her back foot, and Raffi knows her hands would be on her hips if either of them were free right now.
“I knew you could,” she murmurs, still looking resolutely at Raffi’s patella instead of her face. “Didn’t make standing there doing nothing any easier, though.”
“Seven, baby.” Raffi leans toward her slowly, carefully, like she would approach a wounded animal. A bit ironic, that. “E’lev,” she adds, reaching out with both hands. “It’s alright.”
Seven’s shoulders drop, leaking tension from the moment Raffi’s hands make contact with her skin. Raffi strokes over the hollows of her cheeks, the line of her brow, the backs of her eyelids with the pads of her thumbs.
Something had been nagging at her, and she figures, since Seven had started this conversation, now is as good a time as any to bring it up. Now, before they really get started on her knee and she loses both the adrenaline and her nerve.
“You closed your eyes.”
It’s absolutely not an accusation.
It’s not not a question.
“I had to focus,” Seven answers anyway. “Get my body’s response under control so I could help you.”
Like she’s doing now, in all likelihood. She still hasn’t opened them.
“It’s okay if you couldn’t watch.”
Seven doesn’t reply verbally. They’ve struck a nerve. Raffi drops her voice into something softer, easier to stomach. Her next words aren’t palatable ones.
“When you were reassim—,” Raffi pauses, her voice catching in her throat. “Reassimilated. I couldn’t move.”
Seven’s eyes snap open.
“You were injured,” she offers immediately.
But Raffi isn’t blaming herself anymore. And this isn’t about blame, or forgiveness. Raffi isn’t perfectly sure what this is about, but she knows what it isn’t.
“I was. I was also just…stuck. Weighed down by, I don’t know…grief. You were hurting, and there was nothing I could do, and I couldn’t move.”
Raffi’s eyes are closed, now, as if she can’t describe that experience without having to relive it. As if she’s trying futilely to shut herself out of it, to keep from having to watch it play out before her all over again.
“And you went the rest of that day wearing that shirt,” she grates out, mind dredging up that slashed open tee, rust color bleeding out and staining across thin cotton and Raffi’s memory.
She presses her lips together tight, her chin twitches just for a microsecond, and then she’s composed once again. If Seven pressed, she’d blame it on pain from the regenerator. They’d both know it’s a lie.
“If I’d been able to spare you the pain and had to hold back, I don’t think I could have watched,” Raffi finishes. “It’s not the same, but—“
“No, I understand. And…I appreciate it.”
And she did. God, did she. Not having to be alone in that moment, the way she had been as a child. The last to be found on The Raven. Her parents already taken. No one left to protect her, or even to see her as human, as anything other than spare parts.
“Why did you?” Seven asks after several seconds.
Raffi knows what she’s asking. Why did she watch? She isn’t totally sure she can put into words why her instinct was what it was. Seven needed her, and she needed to make sure Seven knew she was still with her. That she’d stay. To the end, if that’s what it was.
“I was there,” Raffi whispers, gaze and voice and everything except her physical being momentarily faraway. “And I didn’t know how long you would be.”
She had been looking away when Elnor died, right in front of her. Within reach, practically in her arms.
She couldn’t bear to miss a second of Seven, excruciating as it was. It’s not how she’d have wanted to remember Seven, not how she would have, hopefully, but she couldn’t have lived with herself if she’d had to remember looking away.
If the last thing Seven had ever seen was Raffi turning her gaze.
Leaving her alone.
Raffi glances up to meet her eye now. “I needed to.” She’s firm in this, resolute even if she can’t quite articulate the clearly strong feelings she has on the matter.
Seven nods as if she understands what she can’t say, and Raffi knows she does.
Seven watches the swelling dissipate and she works, passing the regenerator back and forth in measured lines.
She thinks about kissing Icheb, covering his remaining eye and closing her own, her face turned away even as she pressed her cheek into his forehead. Whispered those last words into his bloodied hair.
She thinks about Raffi, face bruised, lips split and weeping, blood and the desperate sound of Seven’s name.
She thinks about all the ways in which she and Raffi diverge. How such fundamentally, vastly different lives could intersect in such pivotal ways.
How horribly congruous they are in their grief.
The dermal regenerator clicks itself off, job done for now, and Seven sets it down dormant in the nearby tray.
“Good as new,” Raffi cracks, flexing her and extending her leg to demonstrate.
Seven stares pensively at it for several moments, then down at her own abdomen.
“I want to see.”
“My knee?” Raffi glances down at the joint, fluid and no longer distended. A small streak of blood, a rapidly dissipating tingling sensation, and the butchered remains of her slacks the only evidence that anything had ever been amiss.
“You.”
It’s Raffi’s face that’s discolored by pooling blood now as Seven carries her and her two perfectly operational knees out of the medbay, and Raffi’s perfectly healthy heartbeat skips in her chest.
*******