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Seven doesn’t exactly feel hatred – what a waste of energy – but when she looks at B’Elanna Torres, she begins to understand why one might.
B’Elanna, in turn, feels hatred with every fibre of her being, and it seems that all of it is directed at Seven of Nine, especially when she’s in Engineering.
Seven pretends she doesn’t hear it when the captain leans in close to B’Elanna and murmurs “Play nice” as she reports for her next duty shift in Engineering. She just situates herself at a console and gets to work. Still, she can feel Lieutenant Torres’s eyes on her as she works. It is disconcerting, to be watched with every move she makes, but not an unfamiliar feeling since she started on Voyager. They all watch her. They don’t trust her.
She understands, a little, why that is.
There’s a surge from the warp core, and Seven’s console sparks. She barely has time to type in a few commands before B’Elanna is shoving her out of the way, taking over with the kind of vicious efficiency Seven has come to associate with the half-Klingon.
She almost likes it.
Seven is sitting in the mess hall, willing herself to eat just a little more of the plate in front of her, when B’Elanna slides into the seat across from her and says a casual, “Hey.”
It is more than B’Elanna has said to her in weeks.
“Hello, Lieutenant Torres,” Seven swallows. Her food suddenly just became even less appetising.
“We’re off duty, you can call me B’Elanna.”
B’Elanna says this so casually that Seven almost doesn’t recognise it for what it is: a peace offering. The thought makes her shift in her seat. It is disconcerting. B’Elanna is very good at being disconcerting.
“So, I was talking to the captain, and she said you were having some trouble,” B’Elanna soldiers on, ignoring Seven’s discomfort. “She thought some cultural lessons might be of use to you.”
“And she thought you were the best person for the task?” Seven arches an eyebrow. B’Elanna huffs and looks away, crossing her arms over her chest.
“I should have known you’d be difficult about it. I don’t need this. I told Captain Janeway I’d help because it seemed like the right thing to do, but if you’re just going to be like this-”
B’Elanna stands to leave, and Seven, unthinking, grabs her by the arm.
“Wait.”
It’s B’Elanna’s turn to arch an eyebrow, which she does, her forehead ridges pronounced under the mess hall’s dim lights.
“I would appreciate any help in the matter,” Seven says. “If you still wanted to offer it.”
B’Elanna smiles.
They start with language lessons.
Seven is grateful. In the Collective, she had access to every known language across the galaxy. Her mouth had formed the words you are being assimilated in thousands of languages. When her connection was severed, she had lost language after language, one by one, until all that was left in her head was Federation Standard and a smattering of Ocampan.
So when B’Elanna teaches her to say, “Hab SoSlI' Quch!” in Klingon, it almost makes her smile. B’Elanna said it was more fun to start with the insults than the boring pleasantries. Seven has to admit that maybe she’s right.
Language lessons turn to culture, and later Seven sits side by side with B’Elanna in her quarters, looking over photographs of her mixed Klingon-human childhood. In most images B’Elanna wears a vicious scowl, but in one she’s in a Starfleet uniform, standing in front of a bridge with a wide grin and her mother smoothing back B’Elanna’s hair, adjusting the thick warrior’s braid in it. She looks… happy.
Seven wants to ask her about it, but she realises B’Elanna sharing these things, these snippets of culture, is incredibly vulnerable. So, she absorbs them quietly and without reproach.
Seven does not go on away missions often, so when Janeway summons her to the transporter room, she can’t help but feel a little thrill at the thought. When she gets there, she’s joined by B’Elanna and Ensign Kim, who are agreeable company at least. She finds herself almost… excited.
Hours later, as they trudge through mud and snow, B’Elanna cursing up a storm and Ensign Kim offering futile suggestions, Seven closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath. She stops on the trail and just feels the cold on her face, listens to the sound of B’Elanna shouting insults in her delightful cadence.
“B’Elanna, what if we just-”
“Ensign Kim,” Seven calls, taking long strides to catch up. “Do you speak Klingon?”
“Uh, no,” Harry looks sheepish. “I took the Andorian language elective at the Academy.”
“QoH,” Seven says. B’Elanna glances back at her, and says, “Ghuy’cha,” followed by a few words Seven doesn’t quite catch. Her Klingon is improving, still.
“Do you have a plan?” She asks in her imperfect, affected Klingon. She’s working on the accent.
“I’m working on it,” B’Elanna replies in Federation Standard, adjusting the pack on her back.
“HeghmeH jaj QaQ 'oH DaHjaj'e'.” Today is a good day to die, Seven offers. She is trying to make a joke, but she can see from the flash of irritation across B’Elanna’s face it didn’t quite work.
“Not for us, Seven,” B’Elanna says. She marches on. “Not for us.”
On Seven’s next away mission, things go very, very wrong.
The trees above them sway in the breeze, red leaves dancing above their heads and floating down to join them. There is so much blood the dusting of snow beneath Seven’s knees is stained a deep crimson, and she’s digging through her pack for a medical tricorder and something, anything to stop the bleeding while B’Elanna wheezes uncertainly beneath her.
Her hands fumble on the tricorder and she lets out a short, sharp Klingon curse, steadying her grip and waving it over B’Elanna’s wounds. She looks up at Seven with a little half-smile, blood on the edge of her mouth, and says, “Good job. That sounded… almost native.”
“Quiet,” Seven orders, recalibrating the tricorder and trying again. The screen is saying things she doesn’t want to hear and the odds are not in their favour. She is going to try anyway.
“Seven,” B’Elanna rasps, her hands trying to catch the ex-Borg’s as she tries to apply pressure to the wounds. There is a grisly peek of intestine poking out beneath the yellow of B’Elanna’s uniform and the bile is thick in Seven’s throat. “Seven, stop.”
“No,” Seven says, digging through the pack for the dermal regenerator she knows isn’t there.
“Seven,” B’Elanna is uncharacteristically gentle as her hands close over Seven’s. The blood is slick and wet. “Find a communications array. Send a,” she wheezes again, “Send a distress signal. Get back to the ship. Go.”
“No.”
“That’s an order, Seven.”
“I do not answer to you,” Seven’s voice comes out strained. A little desperately, she says, “B’Elanna, please.”
“Seven,” B’Elanna’s eyes are drifting chop. “Hlchop?”
Seven scoots closer to her. Her eyes are leaking lacrimal fluid as she pulls B’Elanna into her arms, the tricorder abandoned in the snow beside them. She smooths the damp hair off B’Elanna’s ridged forehead and presses her lips to it.
She knows what she has to do.
“Properly,” B’Elanna pants, one hand closing over the wet mess of viscera spilling out of her. “C’mon, Seven, you can… do better… than that.”
Seven strokes B’Elanna’s face and takes a deep breath. She thinks she should apologise, but there isn’t time. She leans down and presses their lips together, the rich taste of rust filling her mouth, and brings her fist to B’Elanna’s neck.
The probe slides easily into the flesh, and B’Elanna seizes up in Seven’s arms, her body going stiff as it floods with nanoprobes. Seven is openly weeping, now: she cannot stand the thought of being alone out here, she cannot stand the thought of losing B’Elanna. The ship is lightyears away and they only have each other.
Seven is not losing B’Elanna Torres today.
Seven sits in Sickbay with her eyes closed as the captain shouts. She’s angry, and understandably so, about Seven’s actions down on the hostile planet below.
Seven wonders, idly, if this is how her time on Voyager ends.
But then B’Elanna wakes with a gasp, hands scabbling at her neck, and both the captain and the EMH are at her side in moments. Captain Janeway smooths back her hair and smiles down at her, while the EMH says, “That was a close one, but all Borg technology has been removed from Lieutenant Torres’s system.”
Seven goes to leave. She is not needed here. Captain Janeway can resume denigrating her in the Astrometrics lab.
But B’Elanna calls out, “Seven!” and her voice is hoarse, pleading, and Seven cannot take another step. She turns and faces the Klingon, squaring her shoulders.
She waits for the inevitable rejection. What she did was an unforgivable betrayal in their eyes.
“QaparHa'qu'.”
Seven freezes. She looks uncertainly at the captain, at the Doctor, but neither of them seem to understand what B’Elanna just said to her.
She approaches the bed slowly, takes B’Elanna’s hand in hers.
“And I you,” she says carefully, afraid her meaning will be misconstrued if she tries to say it in Klingon. B’Elanna squeezes her hand, but her grip is weak. Without thinking, Seven reaches forward and brushes the chestnut hair from B’Elanna’s face. The half-Klingon offers her a weak smile.
“You saved my life,” she says.
“It was the correct thing to do,” Seven replies, glancing toward the captain. There’s more, more she wants to say to B’Elanna, but not here. Not in front of prying eyes and listening ears.
B’Elanna is holding onto her hand like she can’t bear to let it go, and truthfully, Seven is unsure she could bear to let go. B’Elanna’s eyes flutter, then drift shut; she’s asleep in mere moments. Seven turns to the Doctor, a question written all over her face, but he gives her a curt nod and says, “She’s fine. She just needs rest. She lost more than half the blood in her body.”
Seven knows this. She was covered in most of it.
“Seven, walk with me,” Captain Janeway says. Seven purses her lips and follows the captain out into the halls of deck five. They seem to be wandering with no set destination, but for once Seven doesn’t mind. She feels oddly restless, and the movement will do her some good.
Seven does not say anything, waiting for the captain to continue her aggressive tirade.
It doesn’t come. Instead, Captain Janeway says, very carefully, “I took Klingon as my elective language at the Academy, you know.”
“Is that so,” Seven replies. It’s supposed to be a question, but it doesn’t come out that way.
“Oh, yes. I was terrible at it. Dropped it after my first semester.”
Seven’s palms seem to be unusually damp. She wonders if she needs to go to Sickbay herself.
“But I did pick up a phrase or two,” Janeway stops, and turns to face her. “Seven, are you and Lieutenant Torres…?”
“I am unsure what you are implying,” Seven lies. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, lying, but not one she’s unfamiliar with.
“Seven,” Captain Janeway says very, very gently. “I’m sorry for yelling at you earlier. I didn’t realise… I understand why you did what you did.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Seven stops in front of the turbolift, itching to get back to Astrometrics. Janeway is looking at her with kind, sad eyes, like she knows something Seven doesn’t.
“Get some rest,” she says, squeezing Seven’s shoulder. “That’s an order.”
Seven nods, and steps into the turbolift. The moment the doors slide shut, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, and then another, wishing she could be by B’Elanna’s side in Sickbay instead of here.
She can’t, though. So, with that thought in her mind, she heads for her alcove.
Seven’s combadge chirps.
“Torres to Seven,” B’Elanna’s voice, sweet as ever, comes through. “Could you meet at my quarters in, oh, say… forty minutes?”
“Affirmative,” Seven says. Her hand falls away from her chest and she exhales slowly. They haven’t talked, yet, not really.
She’s unsure what there is to say. B’Elanna has some strange attraction to Lieutenant Paris, and Seven is not in a position to seek companionship.
However… it would not be amiss to say she desires companionship. She does. Since she was stripped of her Borg technology, Seven’s body has been slowly waking to new feelings, new sensations. The means by which she saved B’Elanna may have been Borg, but the spirit which drove them was entirely human.
She hates that, a little bit.
She finishes the work she’s doing at her console and heads for deck nine, taking even, measured breaths. She’s thought, somewhat, about what she would say to B’Elanna. She’s still thinking about it when she gets to her quarters and hears B’Elanna say, “Enter.”
The words die on her lips at the sight of B’Elanna in a tank top and low trousers, her muscular arms stretched above her head. She grins at Seven and lowers them, standing with one hand on her hip.
“It’s good to see you,” she says. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“I have not,” Seven replies. “There have not been many opportunities to see you.”
“Mmhm,” B’Elanna steps closer. “I still think you’re avoiding me.”
Seven looks away, for just a second, but it’s all the confirmation B’Elanna needs.
“I wanted to ask you something,” she says, turning away. Her lips are a deep crimson, the same colour as the blood that stained her uniform that day. “You defied my direct orders. Why?”
“I,” Seven freezes. She doesn’t have a good answer. The answer freezes on her tongue, cold and cloying and completely unable to be expressed. Of course she has her reasons for defying B’Elanna to save her life. She’s just not sure she can express them.
“Seven,” B’Elanna says. Her voice is unexpectedly gentle. “Why?”
“I have been Seven of Nine as long as I could remember,” Seven says slowly, trying to arrange her thoughts in coherent sentences. “When I was severed from the Borg, I lost that… that sense of community. The Collective.”
B’Elanna doesn’t say anything, just leans up against her desk and watches Seven with an arched eyebrow. She nods for Seven to go on.
“Without the Collective I felt… aimless. I lost… everything. Then with you, I found something again. It was not the same thing. But it was a connection… and I needed… wanted… a connection.”
“You’re not answering my question,” B’Elanna says.
Seven swallows. “I saved you because I have come to care for you, B’Elanna.”
B’Elanna doesn’t seem to remember what she said in Sickbay, or anything after her injuries. Seven supposes that is a good thing. Still, she cannot help herself but to say, “QaparHa'qu', B’Elanna Torres.”
B’Elanna’s eyes widen. “Seven-”
“I understand if it is not reciprocated,” Seven says. She nods her head, as though making up her mind. “I will leave.”
“Seven!” B’Elanna’s hand grasps hers, and Seven glances back, a loose strand of blonde hair falling into her eyes. B’Elanna pulls her close and brushes it off her face, cupping her cheek in one hand.
Seven doesn’t know what to think.
“I love you too,” she says, and then, on her tiptoes, she presses a kiss to Seven’s lips and stains them red again. This time, however, it is with lipstick and not blood, and Seven finds the sensation almost… pleasant.
She pulls back after a moment, looking down at B’Elanna’s warm brown eyes. She wants to do that again. She wants to do it over and over again, every day, for as long as she flies through the stars.
“Lieutenant Torres,” she says. “B’Elanna. May I kiss you?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” B’Elanna replies, pulling her into a close embrace. Their lips meet, mouths crash together, and Seven finds herself relaxing into B’Elanna’s arms, no longer so rigid and set in her ways.
B’Elanna tastes like leola root and cinnamon, and Seven finds her hands wandering B’Elanna’s waist, her hips, sliding up her tank top and feeling the smooth skin underneath. Where there should be a mess of scarring, the Doctor has left B’Elanna with flawless, perfect skin.
Like it never happened.
Seven’s combadge chirps once again and this time it is Captain Janeway’s voice she hears.
“Seven. You’re needed in Engineering. Bring Torres if you know where she is.”
Something in Janeway’s voice tells both women that she knows exactly where they are and what they’re doing.
“Affirmative, Captain,” Seven says. She looks down at B’Elanna and feels her lips twitch upwards, almost into a smile. “Shall we pursue this endeavour later?”
“I would like nothing more,” B’Elanna replies, pulling on her uniform shirt. “Let’s get going. I hate to leave the captain waiting.”