Chapter Text
I. PERFECT MATCHES
B’Elanna wanders into engineering, bone-tired but unable to sleep. There’s still a fire in her, adrenaline kicking around her system, teeth ready to tear. It’s the teeth part that’s bothering her. She was so willing to jump at the man’s throat. She ripped it out so cleanly, and she would do it again if she had to. If her weapons were gone like before, and her hands were cuffed like before, and someone was aiming a phaser at her friends, finger squeezing on the trigger, like before. She would do it again.
It had been instinct, the way she lunged at him. There was something familiar about the way his blood felt, running down her neck.
But the fight’s over. It has been for a few hours now. The ship is no longer under enemy control. The phaser is no longer pointed. The blood is washed from her face. Not her blood. But her victim's.
So, she’s surprised to see Seven standing at a console, diligently analyzing code. She’s more surprised to see the phaser burn still covering half her face.
Seven hasn’t acknowledged her, though B’Elanna knows she heard the door open. The footsteps on the floor. There’s nothing Seven isn’t aware of, and that’s not just because of her Borg enhancements. It’s her strategy in navigating this world, post assimilation. Awareness means survival.
“Seven, I’m sure the Doctor’s treated everyone by now,” B’Elanna says quietly, but it still sounds too loud in this room, with only the humming thrum of the warp core. “Why don’t you get yourself taken care of? You shouldn’t feel obligated to keep working because everyone else is resting.”
“I do not feel obligated to keep working,” Seven tells her as she makes an adjustment to her code. “I am working because I wish to.”
“Well, I wish you to get that burn treated.” This woman gets on her nerves, but she doesn’t want to see her hurt. Of course she doesn’t.
Evidence? The man with the phaser. The ripping of his throat, how it erupted out of his neck. His phaser pointed at Seven’s head. He had still fired right as B’Elanna landed on him. She had moved him enough for the shot not to kill Seven. But only that much.
Now, Seven won’t look at B’Elanna, but she can see the damage to her face. If she had been a second slower. Just a second.
Seven’s jaw clenches in the way B’Elanna has come to know. Irritation. Borg perfection running up against emotional concern and flailing on that stubborn wall. “I have treated it. I applied a salve and my nanobots will take care of most of the damage.”
“We don’t live in the 20th century. You don’t need to rely on bandages and casts and ointments. You could break a bone and have it healed in seconds.” And then B’Elanna does something stupid. She gets closer, right in front of her, tries to meet her eyes. “It might scar if you don’t.”
Seven glances up. The fake and real eye are perfect matches, but one is red, misty. She ducks her head away and storms out of engineering, hands in fists.
B’Elanna doesn’t try to stop her. The doors hiss close. She leans against the console with both hands and pulls in a steadying breath.
II. EVIDENCE
“I think she might be embarrassed,” B’Elanna admits to Harry, leaning over her plate of fried plantains. She has spent her allocated replicator rations on the childhood dish. Everything Nelix had out for the day reminded her of the kill. The throat, the neck. Blood dripping down. His gurgling scream in her ears.
Harry twists noodles around his chopsticks. “That’s not a good reason to refuse medical treatment.”
“Well, no. But for how rational she is, I wouldn’t call her reasonable.”
He’s slurping the noodles up. He doesn’t have to. He’s doing it to be funny and she’s not in a laughing mood. She jabs his hand with her fork.
“Jeez, sorry. No, okay, Seven isn’t always reasonable. Why do you think she would be embarrassed? Most everyone got hurt in the take over.”
Because murder. Because B’Elanna had torn out the throat of a man who threatened to kill her. Because of the rage that came over her when she jumped on him, and how Seven was still hit, still hurt. The sound her body made as it hit the floor. How B’Elanna kept ripping while the other captives screamed, and the other captors ran. Because Seven, in her Borg perfection, was rescued by an animal display.
B’Elanna doesn’t say that. “Because she couldn’t save herself. Because she’s Borg and Borg are indestructible.”
Harry chews thoughtfully. “If that’s true, don’t you think she would want to get rid of the evidence?”
“Good point.” She can’t argue. She pokes at her plantains.
Harry sighs, puts down his chopsticks, even pats her hand in his gentle way. “Look, I don’t love that she’s doing this either. She’s my friend too. But I’m not going to push. When I mentioned it, she wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the duty shift. Maybe she just needs some time. It was a scary situation.”
“Scary? I don’t think Seven is scared of anything. Not after-”
“The Borg?” Tom interjects, joining them with a heaping pile of Nelix’s food. The food that can’t let her forget. “You know, that’s what people in the 20th century said about troops coming back from World War One. And then half of them got diagnosed with ‘shell shock’. So maybe cut her a little slack.”
III. TEAR THROUGH LIKE A FLARE
“Shields are ten percent and failing. We cannot take another direct hit.” Tuvok reports, sparks flying, Voyager rumbling and rattling.
“Tom, how much longer are we in this debris field?” Janeway shouts calmly, one of the only people who can put those two words together. Calm. Shout.
“A few seconds, Captain.”
B’Elanna staggers down to Engineering. She should have gotten there sooner, but she doesn’t want to use the transport when Voyager’s capacities are so low. The ship rocks to the side. She steadies herself on the wall. They're stuck in a debris field from a meteor colliding with a planet. How had they not charted that? It was Seven’s job to see things like this, even if Tom missed it.
Seven. Seven and her burn scar shadowing her face. Seven not letting her forget. Chewing out a man’s throat and for what, for what? A guilt she could never look away from. What a Klingon thing to do. What a human thing to feel.
B’Elanna keeps moving. She passes astrometrics as the ship rocks again. All at once she’s thrown off her feet, flying through the easily parting astrometrics doors. She spills on the floor, cracking her head. Her vision is screwed up, but not enough to miss Seven coming to her aid.
“Lieutenant Torres, why are you not in Main Engineering?” She asks, helping B’Elanna up.
“Just where I was headed before Tom forgot how to fly this motherfucker.”
“Allow me to assist you. There is nothing more I can do here.”
B’Elanna looks up at her. She has such a strange earnestness. B’Elanna wants to let her help. She wants to lean on her arm all the way down the hall and maybe a little longer. But the scar on her face stares at her accusingly. “I don’t need help, thanks.”
“Lieutenant Torres,” Seven says firmly, not letting her into the hallway just yet, a hand on her wrist. “You hit the ground hard enough to cause a concussion for your species. My assistance is not an offer." The ship rattles, not as bad now.
Why does Seven have to do this? Why does she have to do everything she does? B'Elanna knows. It's spite, pride, maybe a little bit of skittishness. B’Elanna could see through her. She was always trying to do the right thing ever since she joined the crew from her collective. B’Elanna had watched her fail time and again, not at her job or impressing Janeway, but at all those little moments. The ones that really counted. B’Elanna can relate to it. The way this place is more of a home to her than to the other crew. The way she still can’t fit in.
Her and Seven, outcasts on a lost ship. She doesn’t want to think about it anymore, doesn’t want it by her side. “You don’t have to rub it in my face.”
“I am not rubbing anything in your face.”
The ship stops shaking. The red alert fades into normal lighting and there Seven is in stark clarity. Scarred and so familiar. B’Elanna pushes her away. “I’m sorry, okay! Yes, I know I should have taken down that guy in a better way, not let my anger take such sloppy action. I should have thought through it like you would have done. You were sitting there so calm with that phaser between your eyes. How could you do that? You were going to die without fighting back! You looked almost happy to do it! And no one else was going to do anything, so I reacted.” She breathes. “But to not even go to The Doctor, after I did that for you? After a man’s throat was in my mouth? After I! I! How could you do that?”
They stand there. B’Elanna pants. Seven is taller, if that’s possible, a hand clasped, shoulders back, downward gaze. B’Elanna leans against the wall, slides down. Seven does not stoop. But she cracks.
“Is there a part of your body that feels more real than others?” she asks, “Can you demonstrate that realness? Are you proud of how you function, your form, your mind?”
B’Elanna wants to put her head between her knees. “What are you talking about?”
Seven brings a hand out from behind her back, the hand with the Borg webbing. She turns it, and the metal components shimmer in the overhead lights. “What I touch with these fingers, I do not feel. People think this hand is real. It is not. My arm was amputated to the elbow when I was assimilated. It only looks real. The Doctor did that.”
“I didn’t know that,” B’Elanna says quietly. It’s all she can do to go along. Seven brings her hand down and B’Elanna grabs it to pull herself back up. It feels like flesh and bone besides the metal. But it’s cold. All of it’s cold.
“When I was disconnected from the Borg, I woke up with my body falling apart. The body they had made me. When I woke up again, I was something different, something new. The Doctor did that. My eye.” She touches it with her metal tipped fingers. She doesn’t blink. “It looks real, but it is not. It has troubled me. What is real, the parts of me the human rejects or the parts of me still held by the Borg?" Seven taps her forehead. “I cannot survive without my cortical implant. Does that make it real or a construct? I cannot hear on this side without this implant.” She touches the star-burst implant by her right ear. “Which noise is more important? The ones from the left, or the right? Which ones are true?”
It's the most B’Elanna’s ever heard Seven say at once. She had said less with the phaser to her head. She had said nothing, done nothing. Serene on her knees, ready to die. At least, that is what B’Elanna had thought. What had Seven thought, as the blood sprayed in the room, dripped down B'Elanna's throat, alighted the rage in her eyes? Had she seen B’Elanna? Not Klingon, human, Marquis, Star Fleet. Had she seen someone real?
“I look one way, but I function so differently than you.” Seven tilts her head and scrutinizes her sadly. “And no one can see it anymore. My implants have been mostly hidden by skin, hair, clothes. The Doctor did that. It makes me feel…unreal. Except for this.”
Finally, her fingers graze over the burn scar, still red and fresh. “This is something real. This is a friend, sacrificing for me. This is the only person who did anything. It’s a record of myself when so much of who I am has been stripped away. Or feared. Or decided by others. You understand that, don’t you? You, of all people.”
B’Elanna nods. She is only now grasping the vast reach of Seven’s awareness. That it can make it all the way to her. “I understand. Seven, I… Seven I thought you were going to die.”
“I know.”
“There was a time when that wouldn’t have mattered much to me.”
“I know.”
“But it does now.”
“I know.”
“You’re real to me. All the parts of you. I hate to see you hurt,” she reaches out as if to touch the scar but stops herself. Not yet. Maybe later, when they’ve talked like this more. For now, she hopes her sincerity is shining through. “But, I’m glad you’re able to show it.”
“Thank you.” And it’s genuine. And it’s shining. How much they both shine in that little room. The same room where his blood had to be scrubbed from the floor. The same room where Seven had knelt, unreal, and where B’Elanna had leapt, brilliant, deadly.
“Should we go to Main Engineering? They might need you, after that,” Seven suggests. B’Elanna knows Seven needs out of this vulnerable moment, and she lets her go. It isn’t awkward, as it might have been before. B’Elanna smiles. White-toothed. Ready to tear.
“Of course. I’ll tell them to blame Tom’s piloting.”