FULL METAL PANIC
by Angelina Vansen (angelina@gunmetaldark.com)

RATING: NC-17 for sexual situations
CODES: J/7, 7/Gretchen
SUMMARY: Back on Earth, Janeway and Seven have lost a little something. I stole the title, but it's got nothing to do with Kubrik.


1. I Want To Protect You

The first month we lived in a hotel, from a suitcase. Kathryn didn't want to believe she was home. She kept me with her right from the start. She introduced me to all the right people, spoke highly of my achievements, all but credited me with the miracle that was Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant. I lived by her side, moving in her wake. I was a little overwhelmed myself. Too many hands to shake, drinks being passed. Too many people I had never seen before.

I supposed I would have to get used to that. Walking in places filled with people I would never know. This was so unlike Voyager.

I never saw Chakotay. He was far away, home at first, then Earth, then with his sister, then somewhere else. He sent messages, but Kathryn deleted them without saying why.

I didn't think about it. I already had too much to think about. Things were beginning to change now between the Captain and me.

We were closer.

As the parties and celebrations faded, we had a lot of time on our hands. We spent it together, mostly in the luxury suite that Starfleet was providing. They'd even installed an alcove for me.

So there we were, alone and together. A Voyager of two.

I started wanting to tell her about things, inane things, things I wouldn't have given a second thought on Voyager. Sometimes she responded, chatting to me as though I were her best friend in the world. I learned some intimate things about her. Sometimes, though, she would still be Kathryn Janeway, sit there catatonic as I recounted my stories.

I started noticing her body, now that she wore different clothes every day. Comparing it to my own. The way her hair was a different colour and texture. The way her legs were more tapered than mine, the way she removed the hair that grew on them. The way her hand looked small when she held it against her face. All these things were pleasant. One day I saw her nipples through a white shirt she wore, and my face went hot. My mouth watered.

I was reminded of the time we'd eaten raspberries for the first time. In silence, on the balcony we barely used. They were sharp, and my mouth had salivated for more of them. I ate them until my belly ached.

I wondered if Kathryn's nipples would have the same texture as the raspberries. Soft, slightly velvety, rolling between my lips, my teeth.

I couldn't look at her for an hour.

Later, she was reading something, a publication, in her bedroom. She had the curtains drawn and was sitting back, her bare feet crossed at the ankle, hidden behind the veils of the bed that was supposed to be for honeymooning couples.

She looked bored.

"Yes, Seven?" she asked, eyes on mine above her PADD.

I didn't answer her, because the words were ridiculous. How do you ask your Captain if you can suck on her nipples?

I sat on the edge of the bed, on the white cover. I didn't dare rest my full weight even. Kathryn's eyes watched me. I was doing something she hadn't expected, which was a good thing now we were home and didn't face the unexpected every day.

Things were different now, though. Perhaps that's why these feelings had emerged. I saw Kathryn every day, saw her dressing, eating, bathing, going to the toilet. I knew what shampoo she used, what colour her toothbrush was, what music she listened to.

She wasn't exactly the distant Captain on the bridge any more. She was practically under my skin.

Her eyes alight with curiosity and a strange smile on her mouth, Kathryn patted the sheets beside her, and downloaded a copy of her publication onto another PADD for me.

I read it, but it barely interested me. It concerned a large accident that had happened in a galactic shipyard about four years ago. A large number of personnel had been killed. The rest were saved, though far enough away to not really feel the direct effect on me.

Someone had given Kathryn this because they thought it was important that she knew what had happened while she was away.

"Did somebody die that you know?" I asked. I wasn't concerned. I wanted to see her reaction.

"Only vaguely," she replied. She was dispassionate. I was relieved and disappointed, all at once. "A girl ... a woman I swam with sometimes."

From all those people, only one.

She sighed and looked at me with frankness in her eyes, something she hadn't really done before. "It's difficult to know how I'm supposed to feel," she said. "This happened four years ago."

She put her hand to her head, her fingers into her hair, messing it up a little. She looked at me, her eyes unfathomable.

She was so much like me.

I moved a little closer to her on the bed, and my hand brushed hers. She smiled, and went back to her PADD.

2. Still Alive

Kathryn tried to introduce me to the pleasure of clothes. We shopped, rather aimlessly, sometimes out, but more often through the replicator.

She chose garments for me and dressed me in them, showing me how each one was supposed to fit. She fastened the buttons, smoothed the seams and the hems. Folded the pleats over my knees, her peculiar eyes dilated and dark with something unreadable.

She ordered me a bra one day, something I had not needed in my dermoplastic outfit. I put it on, and then she followed me into the darkened bedroom to help me fit it.

First, she brushed her fingers over the hair under my arms, a smile on her face.

"You're supposed to shave that," she told me.

"Why?" I requested.

She shrugged. "Everyone does. Women, anyway."

"All right," I agreed. Once, there was a time when I would have questioned her further.

She turned her attention to the white cotton bra, eyes on the stitched pattern of flowers across it.

She slid her fingers under the straps, pulling slowly at the adjusters. My breasts moved up higher up my chest. Next, her hands moved over and around, and went under the underwire, squeezing at my breasts until they met in the middle. She ran the backs of her fingers over the sides of my breasts, slowly.

Then, she cupped them, without saying a word. Her eyes on my eyes, silent in the mirror. She was touching me inappropriately.

Then she let go and left the room, without an expression. I stared at my reflection a moment longer, my eyes huge and cold. Then I got dressed, the bra beneath my blue dress, hair loose and curled and swinging. My face burned red and my nipples were stiff with arousal.

I knew what that was.

By the time I followed her outside, Kathryn was standing by the window in the living area. Her arms were folded, and she was looking at the buildings outside.

"Are you in love with me, Captain?" I asked her. Her title seemed appropriate. She had the face of the Captain on right then.

She looked at me sharply. For a moment I thought I shouldn't have mentioned it.

In the end, she sighed and shrugged.

"It's been a long time since I touched someone, Seven," she said.

"Yes," I agreed.

I knew what I should do. I unbuttoned my dress and took off the bra, baring my breasts even though the window was right in front of us. Kathryn watched me, dumb.

"You may touch me," I told her.

I took hold of her hand and it was trembling slightly as I placed it back on my breast, the palm covering the nipple. She squeezed it ever so slightly, a reflex.

"Is it ... nice?" I asked her.

She looked at me helplessly, her lip trembling a little now, as well. "Yes," she whispered, so softly I barely heard her at all.

Her hand squeezed harder, rhythmically. I didn't touch her at all and she didn't look at me. Instead, she looked at her hand, and her face was red.

When she spoke, her voice was a thin thread. "Would you ... like to touch me, as well?"

She didn't give me a chance to reply, or to touch her. Instead, she kissed me, pressing her lips against mine and then easing her tongue into my mouth. The breath from her nose swept warm across my cheek.

She was hungry, pulling my head towards her, eating my mouth and groaning like a dying woman. This was not like kissing Axum, or Chakotay. They had been polite and reverent, afraid of hurting me, I supposed.

Maybe Kathryn didn't care.

She took my hands and pulled me back into the bedroom, and pressed me back against the bedpost. She placed my hand between her legs, pushing two of my fingers up inside some warm, wet delight.

"Rub there," she told me, and I did.

She put her foot on the mattress to let me thrust in deeper, and I kissed her neck as I fondled her, roughly, over and over. She made sounds like a women in sex films. She pressed against me, wet and sloppy.

"Take your dress off," she demanded.

I took my dress off. She undressed as well, and she was so petite when she was naked I was frightened I might kill her somehow. My Borg hand itched to leave long gloomy bruises all over her awful white skin.

She held me down, on top of me, on the bed. Her hands pressed against my wrists, above my head. She panted. I spread my legs instinctively about her hips and she thrust between them, so much like a man, so much like Chakotay. I could almost feel the ghost of his penis between us. She hadn't wanted me to be in love with him.

Her face got flushed as she humped against me, hair a little sweaty at the hairline, eyes pained slits. I reached between us and put my fingers up inside her once again and thrust.

She choked an orgasm out against my breast, not wanting me to see her face. She writhed and bit and clutched the sheet, her hips and thighs and belly shuddering over and over.

I watched her, curious.

She was still warm and fluid as she slid down my body, led by her lips. She held my hips and put her mouth between my legs. I quaked in response, part of me loving it, part of me wanting to squirm away from the fat, wet slide of her tongue in such an intimate part of me. Chakotay had never done this to me.

She rolled me over and I sat on her face, grinding unashamedly. I didn't care, I didn't think of anything at all. Doing this was pleasurable and it drove me and drove me until I orgasmed with a wail, straddling Kathryn's face, her tongue poked rudely inside me.

Afterwards, we lay quite separately, not saying anything.

It wasn't that I wanted what I'd had with Chakotay. To be honest, falling asleep in someone's arms was constricting, and there had always been something cloying about his promises of love.

But Kathryn didn't say a word.

In the end, I spoke, instead. "I wasn't aware," I said, "that you were attracted to women."

She smiled, and finally looked at me with her reddened face and smudgy make-up. "There are a lot of things about me you aren't aware of," she said.

That annoyed me. It seemed arrogant somehow, and somehow she just wasn't the Captain when she was flat on her back with her sex still swollen and musky in front of me.

"Thank you, Seven," she said softly, but I didn't respond.

I went into the bathroom and showered sulkily while she washed at the sink. Later that day, she took me again several times rather roughly, then once in the night much more gently.

3. Part Time Steady

A few days afterwards, Kathryn had a communication, pre-recorded, from her mother. I didn't see it, but it caused her to behave strangely for the whole day. She picked a couple of arguments with me, one about my hairpins on the dresser, another about the fact I hadn't spat my toothpaste down the sink correctly.

Then all she wanted to do was cuddle me. She rested her head on my lap while I read the day's news reports from a PADD, rubbing my thighs with her cheek. I smiled and placed a hand on her back to stroke her, but what she wanted was attention.

"Would you care to make love?" I asked. Kathryn hated it when I requested that we "copulate".

She sighed. I didn't think that even she was sure of what she wanted. Possibly she was becoming bored. We hadn't left our suite since the afternoon that we had become lovers.

"I've got an idea," she said, and got up to go to the computer interface.

The screen above the fireplace, normally blank like the wall, woke up, displaying a perfect image of me, sitting on the sofa reading the PADD.

"It's recording," Kathryn said.

"Oh?" I enquired.

"You might find this arousing," she explained.

She dropped to her knees in front of me, fierce grey eyes on mine. Sometimes those eyes were more inhuman than the Borg, I thought. This was definitely one of those times.

I was wearing a black skirt, probably a little smart for sitting about in, but Kathryn still chose my clothes each day. The undergarments were quite elaborate, too: rich black lace-top stockings. High heel shoes.

Kathryn pushed the skirt slowly up my thighs, creasing it. My panties were down in a whisper of black satin. I watched on the viewscreen as she lowered her mouth, watching my eyes and my face and my body, becoming aroused. I clutched at the cushions and cried like a cat as her tongue lapped and lapped and lapped.

I was surprised by my face at the moment of orgasm. Kathryn's was ugly, contorted, teeth bared in a horrible snarl. I hadn't expected mine to be the same, but it was. Somehow I expected my climax to be a little less human than hers.

I found myself wishing she hadn't recorded it.

She turned away from me, and I inserted my fingers into her from behind, feeling for the place she called her G-spot. I thrust in and out of her like a penis, using two and then finally three fingers. She came hard, and I watched her face on the screen. I would have to destroy this recording.

We took our clothes off and held each other on the sofa. My hands and her face smelled strongly of sex.

"I've got to go home at the weekend, Seven," she said eventually in a very small voice.

"Home?" I asked. I had thought we were already home.

"Yes. My mother has told me I have to come home." She paused at my blank expression. "To Indiana."

"Oh," I say, not fully understanding why she seemed so peculiar about it.

She sighed. "Well, I guess it had to happen," she said philosophically. "Now that the debriefings are over, anyway."

She looked small and forlorn. I took hold of her hand, thinking that perhaps she needed some support. "I will accompany you," I offered. After all, she had once promised she would show me her home town.

She snorted out a small, derisory laugh, as if the notion were utterly ridiculous. Then, after a moment's silence, she looked at me from her corner of her eye.

"All right," she said evenly.

"Yes?" I asked, deeply unsure that she meant it.

"Yeah, why not?" she shrugged. "Phoebe used to bring her boyfriends back sometimes."

"Am I your boyfriend then?" I smiled. I meant it as a tease, a joke.

She didn't smile. "Yes," she said. "I suppose you are."

4. Run Running Ran

That day was Wednesday. We had Thursday, which we spent packing up our life. On Friday, we got married.

Kathryn proposed over her breakfast, a poached egg and some dry toast.

"Would you like to get married, Seven?" she asked, without even looking up from her PADD.

"Yes," I replied, thinking that she meant in the future, probably to someone other than herself.

"Really?" she asked. "Why don't we, then?"

I was too surprised to speak.

"I could go to HQ and get things sorted out. I know plenty of Captains whose ships are in dock at the moment. We could beam aboard and have one of them marry us. This afternoon, if you wanted."

I didn't know what to say. "You believe we have known each other for a sufficient length of time?" was all that came out.

"Four years," she shrugged.

"Yes," I agreed. I didn't protest that we had been lovers for only a week, that she was a different person now she was back, that I wasn't certain if I loved her at all. I was too accustomed to thinking that she always knew best.

She grinned at me, and after breakfast she made calls to arrange it.

After lunch, I went into the bedroom to find my wedding dress, out on the bed. She had chosen it, replicated it while I was eating.

I was amazed. It was huge, elaborate, in pure white satin with a long white train and a long white veil. A little girl's dream of a wedding dress. I wasn't even sure how to put it on.

"You like it?" asked Kathryn from the doorway. She was already dressed in her dress uniform, the old-style one she had had for years on Voyager.

I looked at the dress for a long moment. "Yes," I whispered finally.

"Thought you might as well do it properly," she smiled sheepishly.

"What about you?" I asked her. "Don't you want to do it properly?"

"I'll get married in the uniform, like my father and his father before him," she stated firmly.

That disturbed me. It was like she was the man and I was the woman. The bride and groom. "Are you ... sure?" The dress seemed more like it had come from her fantasy than mine.

"Yeah," she shrugged. Her eyes went to mine, intense and grey. "Want me to help you put it on?"

Once again, she helped me dress. Easing me into the pure white panties, pulling the softness of the stockings up my legs. Fastening them. Holding my hands as I stepped into the dress. I had already shaved underneath my arms.

She zipped it up, and I turned to look at her. She was looking at me, her mouth open a little. I thought she might be about to cry.

"Kathryn ..." I whispered. I wanted to tell her to stop, that this was not the moment she thought it was, but I didn't. I didn't speak at all.

She grinned, catching herself. "We'd better get going," she said. "Before I lose my nerve."

I shook all the way to the transport station, all the way through the corridors of the Magdalene, the ship we were to be married on. I don't know if Kathryn noticed. If she had taken my hand, if she had touched me at all, she would have done. If she'd have noticed, and spoken, I would have said something. I would have been able to.

But she didn't, and I didn't, and so we went through with it without a word.

Afterwards, when asked, I would always say the same thing. I phrased it like a story, as far as people believe an ex-Borg is capable of telling stories. I said that Kathryn's Academy classmate Captain Mary Shepherd married us in a simple but lovely ceremony.

We were attended by two witnesses, Commander James Sunderland and Lieutenant Commander Angela Orosco. They were all in dress uniform, as was Kathryn. I wore a white satin bridal gown, chosen by Kathryn.

Afterwards, we held a small reception in the Officers' Mess. We drank champagne and I became slightly intoxicated. Then, we returned home and prepared to return to Kathryn's home.

Of course, that is only a partial account of events, but it satisfies friends.

What I never mention, not to Kathryn, and only rarely to myself, are the following details: I believe that Captain Shepherd was disgusted by the fact that Kathryn was marrying me. She looked horrified, and barely spoke to either of us before or after. As a result, I also felt the service was flat, emotionless, and devoid of any warmth. It was only later that I discovered Captain Shepherd's mother had been killed at Wolf 359.

Commander Sunderland and Lieutenant Commander Orosco became bored and shuffled from foot to foot during the ceremony. Orosco yawned several times. They were obviously unhappy at being pulled back from shore leave early.

Even we weren't quite right somehow. Kathryn's dress uniform was old and did little to flatter her spreading belly. The make-up on her left eye was smudged and uneven. I felt faintly ridiculous in my enormous dress, out of place, speaking words that I knew would soon be a lie.

You see, I knew even then that it was wrong of me to promise I would love Kathryn until the day that I died. I also knew it was wrong of her to promise me the same thing.

After the reception that wasn't a party, a small piece of cake, and a lot of champagne, I followed Kathryn back to the transporter room. She was definitely drunk. As soon as we got back to our hotel, she pulled me to her for sex.

She claimed she wanted a wedding night, but all she wanted was an orgasm. A hard one. She bent over a stack of packing cases and pulled on her own nipples while I caressed her sex miserably. Here in this room, surrounded by cases and belongings from Voyager, it all became too much. I couldn't look her in the eye, knowing the lies I'd just told her.

I couldn't speak. Everything seemed to be watching me. Her sextant, her communicator, her Greco-Roman warrior. My biosuit, my silver shoes, the mirror I practised my smiles in.

All of it, everything knew my lies.

After she came, shrieking and biting the skin on the back of her hand, she buried herself under the skirts of my dress to make me come with her mouth. I begged her not to bother, but in the end, I came anyway. She was good at pleasuring me.

Afterwards, she kissed me softly, her mouth and my mouth tasting of alcohol and sex. I was sleepy and warm, and she cradled me to her shoulder, kissing my mouth and my cheeks over and over again, almost rocking me in her arms like the child I wanted to be sometimes.

In that moment, though, it was okay. She smelled like the Captain again, like she was strong and brave and she knew best. For a moment I thought it was all going to be all right.

5. Wind Rising In The Homeland

Gretchen Janeway was a small woman, smaller even than Kathryn although they looked very alike. She was sitting on a chair in her porch with a drink in her hand when we arrived. It was very hot, but she was in the shade.

"Hello mother," Kathryn said.

Gretchen barely looked up. "You brought your Borg?" she asked in a throaty voice.

"My Borg is my wife," said Kathryn with an air of bravado. I had the feeling she'd been practising this moment.

Gretchen looked at me then, although she made no move to get up at all. It was like I was being scanned, analysed. What had Kathryn's mother once been? A mathematician? An astrophysicist? A scientist of some sort. "Very nice," she said to my breasts.

"Yes, we decided to get married yesterday," Kathryn continued, determined not to have her moment ignored.

I was embarrassed. Kathryn hadn't explained this part, the part where she had married me to piss her mother off.

Gretchen stared at her for a long moment. Kathryn stuck out her jaw, looking like a small child.

"Laura is cooking dinner," Gretchen said eventually. "Perhaps you should change."

She had barely moved since we had arrived. The way Kathryn had spoken of her home when we were on Voyager, I had expected it to be a warm, welcoming place. I had expected her mother to care that Kathryn had been missing for seven years.

As we went upstairs to the guest bedroom, Kathryn's face was dark and her jaw was tight. She chewed her bottom lip. She didn't say anything as she dressed in a cool, white cotton sundress and brushed her hair, stroke after stroke, with the silver hairbrush on the dresser.

I noticed that some of Kathryn's hair was already in it. Long strands of red that would have reached to her waist.

"You and your mother are alike," I said to break the silence.

She stopped brushing her hair. "Don't say that," she said. "Mark always used to say that."

I had meant in the way that they looked, but I think Kathryn feared I had meant in other ways.

Before dinner, I took the opportunity to look around the house that Kathryn had grown up in. Her parents had been traditionalists, she told me. I always took that to mean that they didn't use replicators or sonic showers or holonovels.

I thought this would have been a bad thing, growing up with chores and work and effort.

However, it seemed that Gretchen employed a fleet of servants to do things traditionally for her. There was Laura, who was cooking the dinner, Maria, who cleaned the house and Eddy, who tended the gardens with the traditional tools, a mower and a strimmer and pruning shears.

Gretchen, it seemed, was only Captain.

She sat outside with her drink for the next forty-five minutes while dinner cooked, and Kathryn fidgeted. She nervously let me into her father's study, untouched since the day he died. Of course, it was meticulously cleaned every day by Maria, but everything was precisely how he left it.

Suddenly, I understood why Kathryn's hairbrush still had hairs in. I understood why there were seven paintbrushes, cleaned and placed in perfect disarray beside an empty easel.

This house was a memorial, a museum of dead and missing Janeways, kept in place by Gretchen. Even Phoebe wasn't coming home. Kathryn had learned her sister lived a separate life now, with her child, away from home. Kathryn heard that she never called in to say hello.

I felt sorry for Gretchen for a while, thinking she was living here among her memories. No wonder she was sitting on her porch at four in the afternoon with a drink that wasn't synthehol.

Then Kathryn showed me the family portraits in her father's study. Gretchen looked like a young Kathryn in all of them. She had the same jawline, the same eyes, the colour of arrogant ice. I could imagine her challenging the Borg, I could imagine her taking on the Hirogen. The same fire, the same superiority. The same absolute conviction that she was always right.

Kathryn had lost that since we got back to Earth. Kathryn had nothing to command, and a career that had been jeopardised by her reckless choices and obvious death wish. What would happen if she did not get her ship back?

I thought of Kathryn in the Void, the vast expanse of space where she had tried to kill herself to save us all. She'd had too much time alone with ghosts in there, too much time to sit alone and brood.

Then I saw what Mark saw, the Kathryn that was Gretchen soon, laid out with her drink while her minions ran and did her bidding, all for nothing. All for nothing.

I stared deep into the eyes of Gretchen in the portrait, and noticed next to her, little Kathryn held her father's hand.


6. Deep Trap

We sat together at the large wooden table while our meal was served to us by Laura. Kathryn and her mother laid their napkins neatly on their laps and I did too, emulating them.

Gretchen was still drinking.

"When did you become a lesbian, Kathryn?" she asked suddenly.

Kathryn flinched. I don't think she had been expecting something quite so personal.

"Is she your first?" Gretchen smiled spitlessly, as if she was enjoying her daughter's discomfort.

"Does it matter?" Kathryn asked, playing with the food on her plate. "Isn't a person a person?"

"Of course, equal opportunity sex. How very Starfleet of you, dear," Gretchen laughed.

"I think you've had a little bit too much to drink, mother," Kathryn said gently.

"Well, you have to expect me to be curious, Kathryn. You can't turn up home with a well-stacked blonde as your wife and just expect me not to mention it. I mean ... you haven't even told me her name!"

"You know her name," Kathryn spat. "You can't be THAT ignorant of what happened on Voyager."

Politely, I stood up and extended my hand, just as Kathryn had taught me to do at functions. "Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One," I said.

Gretchen laughed right in my face as she took my hand and shook it.

"Jesus Christ, Kathryn, I knew vibrators were getting more animated these days, but this is fucking ridiculous!"

Kathryn's voice dropped right to her toes, and she levelled her mother with the kind of death-glare she had only reserved for life and death situations on Voyager. "Don't ever speak about Seven like that," she warned. "Ever."

With that, she got up and left the room, leaving her food almost completely untouched.

Gretchen grinned from ear to ear. "I'm sorry," she said to me, although she was possibly the least remorseful human being I had ever seen.

"That is all right," I said.

Then, because I was afraid to be alone with Gretchen, I left the table and followed Kathryn upstairs.

Kathryn was sitting on the bed, her hands in fists at her sides. She didn't say anything. She didn't even look up when I came into the room.

"Are you all right?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"We could go," I said. "If you want to."

She didn't reply. We didn't have anywhere to go, and Starfleet probably wouldn't pay for another hotel.

Slowly, though, she began to relax. I sat with her, and although I didn't touch her or hold her, I felt as though my presence helped her.

She stood up to look out of the window to where the sun was setting over the fields and houses where she had grown up. The colour of the light lit up the fire of her hair and made her skin glow richly. She looked beautiful.

"Do you love me, Annika?" she asked.

I didn't like her using my human name. It didn't feel like me at all. But perhaps it wasn't right that I only had a designation now. Maybe Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One wasn't a name you could have when you were someone's wife.

"Yes," I said softly, because she was beautiful, and I did have a lot of feeling for her.

"I love you too," she whispered, so softly I could barely hear her.

She came over to me, pulling the white sundress up over her bare brown skin and letting me stroke her and feel her all over. We made love slowly and reverently, really in tune for the first time. Kathryn cried softly into my hair and my shoulder, and then against my sex as she pleasured me with her warm silky tongue. I came sharply and unexpectedly fast, one of my hands grasping a handful of that bright red hair.

After that, she fell asleep, unsatisfied herself. She turned away from me and cuddled one of the pillows, but then she didn't like to be touched while she slept.

It was still early, only 2100, so I put on a robe and sat reading some PADDs. One was a novel that Kathryn recommended. The other was a proposal of work that I would have accepted if I hadn't married Kathryn.

I tidied our clothes that we had dropped on the floor. I brushed my hair in the mirror, using Kathryn's brush. I sang to myself because I had promised the Doctor that I would continue to practise.

Then, I needed to regenerate. My eyes felt dry and everything inside me seemed to crackle slightly. My muscles were crisp.

Since returning to Earth, I no longer needed a full alcove to do so. Dr. Dombrowski, who had studied my case, had developed a system of self-renewing nanoprobes for my blood. The Borg would be very interested.

All this required was a small hypospray at the end of the day, followed by a good night's sleep. I gathered my washbag, my hypospray and my toothpaste and went to the bathroom.

There, I sat down on the toilet to prepare my injection.

"Are you a drug addict?" asked a voice from the other side of the room.

In my concentration, I had failed to notice that Gretchen was in there, lying in the bath.

I jumped to my feet. "I'm sorry," I said. "I did not realise the bathroom was occupied."

"That's all right," she said softly. For a moment, she sounded so much like Kathryn that I was taken aback. I just stared at her, looking at her naked body through the crystal clear bathwater.

"Are you a drug addict?" she repeated in that same, soft voice.

"No," I told her, showing her the hypospray. "It contains nanoprobes, which help to maintain my body's systems."

"Oh," she said.

"I was Borg," I told her.

"I know that," she said. "I know a lot of things about you, Seven of Nine. I kept myself well informed of what my daughter did on board Voyager."

I quite believed it.

"There is one thing, though ... that I don't understand," she said pointedly.

I gave her the response I thought she wanted. "What's that?" I asked tamely.

"Why you and Kathryn got married."

"Because we love each other," I said. At that moment, my thighs damp and aching from our lovemaking, I almost believed it myself.

She smiled a slow, creeping smile. "Well, I'm sure riding the rapids of Kathryn's emotions will be a lot of fun for you, Seven of Nine," she said.

I didn't know how to respond to that. Instead, I looked at her, suddenly mesmerised by the thought that I was looking at the body of my wife in thirty years' time.

Gretchen wasn't at all ashamed. She sat exactly as she had sat before I came in. Even her legs were apart.

"Take your nanoprobes, if you need them," she said at last.

I nodded, mute. I could feel my face burning, and I was very aware that I may smell like I had just had sex. I sat back onto the toilet and rolled up my sleeve.

The relief was instantaneous. At once I could feel my systems grind back into action. Times like this, everything felt like the metal it was. Even my teeth had a tang to them. I needed some sleep.

"Is Kathryn your first, Seven of Nine?" Gretchen asked from the depths. I opened my eyes and turned towards her, intending to rebuke her for speaking so intimately to me.

But she had gotten out of the bath and was standing naked on the bathmat in front of me. Water was beaded all over her body, and her body was flushed pink from the heat.

"No ..." I started, before I could stop myself. "I mean yes ... she is my first female."

"Does she excite you?" she asked.

I did not understand the purpose of that question. Was it intended to embarrass me? Or did she want to open up to me, accept me as part of the family? It was so hard to tell, and I had no experience in these matters. I wanted Kathryn to wake up and rescue me.

"Of course she does," I said in the end. I wasn't ashamed of it, if that was what she thought.

"I used to listen to her fucking that philosopher. Mark. All night, sometimes, one time after another after another. I wondered how he kept up with her."

This was a surprise to me. Kathryn never seemed that voracious with me. Perhaps Voyager had changed that about her, too. Maybe she was just older.

But this wasn't Gretchen's point, apparently. "She drove him crazy," she continued. "He was such a weak man."

"Oh," I said, and I think she knew I was secretly pleased.

"He was never enough, he never satisfied her ..." she was looking at me now, her head on one side, regarding me through curious eyes. "Perhaps she was always attracted to women," she mused. "Perhaps she knew it, even then."

She stepped even closer, so close I could feel the heat coming off her skin. "I heard you fucking her tonight," she told me. "She sounds good. You sounded as though you were enjoying yourself."

"Kathryn's a very stimulating lover," I told her, aware really that a mother should not want to know that about her daughter really.

"Yes," she said, and slowly, so slowly I wasn't even sure it was happening, she reached out for me, stroking along the neckline of my robe. It moved back from my skin slightly, showing a small, dark patch of skin where the blood had been sucked to the surface by Kathryn's hungry lips on our wedding night. Later, she had called it a hickey.

Below it, a silver star-shaped implant slipped from the robe as well. Gretchen didn't flinch. "This is part of the Borg?" she asked.

I nodded. My tongue seemed to be paralysed.

"It's attractive," she said. "Intricate, like jewellery."

"Thank you," I said softly. I was beginning to lose sense of myself. I was beginning
to feel small trails of fire in my skin where Gretchen's fingers were.

I let her part my robe the whole way down. I let her push it off my shoulders. I let her look at me, in all my Borg marred/perfected glory. Between my legs I was still wet and swollen.

She looked at my body, and I looked at hers right back. She was so much like Kathryn. Her rounded belly, her delicate wrists and arms. Her full breasts with prominent nipples, darker than Kathryn's but exactly the same shape. Even the freckles were there, more obvious than Kathryn's because of years in the sun instead of years on a starship growing milky white.

"Do you desire me?" I asked her, expecting my directness would disconcert her. I leaned in very close, breathing her breath.

She took a step back, regarding me with a smug, self-confident look. "I admire you," she said with a grin. "You've signed up for a lifetime of Kathryn."

She picked up a towel and wrapped it around herself. Her eyes never left mine as she left the room.

I picked up my robe, feeling sick from the hypospray, feeling sick from fear of what I had just almost done, what it must mean, so soon after my wedding. I went back and got into bed next to Kathryn, who was hugging her pillow and sucking her thumb.

7. Dangerous Safehouse

Starfleet gave Kathryn a desk job because she was a hero, but it wasn't important, because she was a maverick. We got a house in Indiana, two streets from Gretchen, but we rarely saw her. When we did, Kathryn got upset.

She bought a dog, and I trained him. I needed a project because I became bored and couldn't work. When I worked away, Kathryn got upset.

I did a course, learned to cook, and read almost every book ever written. I even tried to write my own. For a while I thought that we should have a child together. I even thought about asking Chakotay for his sperm. I hadn't seen him since Voyager, and we never went to reunions or anything like that.

When Kathryn got pissed off with being a conduit for paperwork, we took a trip together, a holiday around the world. Every morning we'd beam somewhere different on the planet, and every night we'd beam back home to bed. We did this for eight months, until Kathryn couldn't be bothered any more. Until she said we'd been every place she'd wanted to see.

Then she tried like mad to get us a ship. Through official channels at first, then she just tried to buy something, just to get back out in space. She said she thought that she'd go mad, spending the rest of her life on Earth.

We quarrelled then. I reminded her that not so long ago, she thought she'd lose her sanity if she spent the rest of her life on Voyager.

"At least we were moving, Seven," she yelled back bitterly. "At least we were fucking moving!"

Eventually she gave up, but she was never happy. She started dozens of other projects in other fields. Science, archaeology, history, astronomy. Anatomy, physiology. Mathematics. Genealogy. Psychology. She didn't want to give it up.

Eventually, it came to nothing. All of it just came to nothing.

THE END


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