S I G N A L
- TO -
N O I S E

SIGNAL TO NOISE
by Angelina Vansen (angelina@gunmetaldark.com)

RATING: NC-17
CODES: J/7
SUMMARY: After a bad experience at the hands of an alien race, Seven and Kathryn discover the pleasures of caring for each other. Once again, this is a dark story, and may not be to everyone's taste. I'd go into specifics, but I don't want to ruin it!


The Captain was back on the bridge today, but things were not the same.

She sounded like the Captain, true, and she even looked like her, though a little wearier around the eyes. Thinner, too, though I doubt anyone but me and Chakotay noticed that.

Her recovery has been remarkable. She is a strong woman with a strong will, and the Doctor has been very pleased with her progress. She has improved very well.

What he doesn't know is that I have not.

My injuries he healed in a matter of minutes. Minor malnutrition. A scrape on my forehead, all but healed by my nanoprobes. The crescent-shaped punctures in my human hand.

I don't know if he realised, but they were from Kathryn's nails, where she gripped my hand at night because she was frightened of the coming dawn.

I have seen her naked. I have heard the raw metal of her voice. Howling. Squawking. Shrieking. Pleading. Crying. Telling everything.

On the floor, sobbing for her mother.

They laughed at her, asked me how I could follow her orders. Her, my brave courageous Captain, wailing mommy at my feet.

I didn't know the answer.

All I did was bathe her softly when they left us for the night. Rags, soft and muslin, white. Wet. Turned in the water, wrung in my hands. Over her fevered flesh while she moaned from pursed lips that made an "o" of pleading.

I held her all night, while she slept fitfully and dreamed of the days passed, and the days ahead. Then, as the daylight came up slowly through the tiny barred window, the panic would start.

For some reason, the torture devices didn't work on me. They couldn't shoot me, either; their weapons were the wrong frequency. My Borg shields deflected them easily and I just stared at them passively while they drained their weapons.

For the first couple of days, they contented themselves with beating me half to death, but quickly became uninterested when I was whole and healthy the next morning, thanks to my nanoprobes. They restrained me and tortured the Captain, instead. She was much more susceptible.

It is that susceptibility that I saw on the bridge this morning. Since it happened, everyone's been taking it in turns to watch her, comfort her, reassure her that she's still the woman she once was. No one thought to offer those same reassurances to me. I'm frightened she can't command this ship.

I watch her and she's arrogant. Cocky. Joking with Tom Paris and swinging her hips as she walks back to her seat. I see Chakotay slavering over the turn of her buttocks, that self-satisfied smirk on his face. Tuvok pandering to her, providing her with stiff one-liners designed to bring that half-smile to her face. I watch her with cold detachment. She's faking.

She is still that woman with dead eyes urinating down her leg with fear. The woman crying on the stonecold floor for God to take her. The woman on her knees, grateful to be giving her captor oral sex for a moment free of pain. She isn't fooling me.

All shift, she doesn't look at me. She thinks she doesn't need to.

I could, of course, be working down in Astrometrics on this data, but I won't. I need to see this. How the beautiful crew make Captain Janeway who she is. The only piece that's missing here is me.

Later, I sit in the Mess Hall with Naomi, swallowing the slow sludge of my supplement while she watches me. We drink in silence.

"What's the matter, Seven?" she asks me solemnly.

I regard her. "Captain Janeway," I reply.

"Oh," she says, her serious face.

"I find the crew's attempts to reinstate her as Captain of this vessel to be nauseating and offensive. She clearly requires extensive counselling and rehabilitation, and yet they insist on bolstering her with false platitudes and reassurances about her competence. I do not feel as though any of them are qualified to take care of her. They have little knowledge of the events that occurred."

Naomi says nothing. I didn't expect her to, she rarely understands me.

Still, I feel better for having articulated it. No one thought to ask me to help the Captain after our return. I'd only been with her the whole entire time. I'd only been her one connection to her sanity.

I think they thought I didn't understand how she was feeling.

I go back to the cargo bay, and look in the mirror as I find my modulated scalpel. I know what I am going to do.

I cut slowly into the numb skin on my scalp. My hair gets bloody, but it will wash. I cut here because here the flesh is numb, grafted over Borg-plated cranium. Here I can get to my nano-core, the part of me that controls my nanoprobes.

I take it out, and look at it coldly. Inside me, my blood fizzes as the nanoprobes shut down, sending idiot signals to each other. I can feel it. I can hear it in my Borg-plated mind.

Blood pours from the wound down my head and into my eyes as I adjust the nano-core. Already my breathing is difficult. Some parts of my tissue are already necrotising.

It is not a difficult task, although the Doctor probably should have performed it. There is always the danger of the unforeseen. The nano-core slips back into my head, the little gold grooves grinding against my bone until they are home.

The first thing I notice is that my head doesn't heal. Although there is still no pain, the nanoprobes would normally regenerate me. I feel them going back to their tasks, maintaining the Borg bits that maintain me.

I keep a dermal regenerator in my personal diagnostic kit. I run it over the wound, and it knits. I watch in the mirror as the silver of my skull is covered by my pale frail human flesh. I feel new and vulnerable. Excited. Anything could happen to me now. I can be cut, and injured. I can be tortured, just like Captain Janeway.

Absently, watching my eyes in the mirror, I use a sterile cloth to wash the blood from my hair and my head. I lick a bit of it, surprised to find it tastes like metal. The most human part of me.

I go back on duty. Tal Celes and I alone in Astrometrics. The whole time, my skin is tingling. The whole time, I am looking at things, to see if they have sharp edges on them. Everything's a danger.

When I use a circuit modulator, I feel a desire to stab it through the thin skin of my hand. To turn it on and burn.

I fantasise about it. What would my cries sound like? Would the pain drive me insane? I imagine my pale and wretched form on the floor, curled up like Janeway in the prison. I imagine my own voice whimpering for my mother, but then that's not likely. Perhaps I would cry out for the Queen.

Maybe I would even cry out Captain Janeway's name.

Sweat springs out on my forehead at the thought. My eyes dart in their sockets. My respiration increases. I fidget. Tal Celes watches me with her usual nervous eyes. Her prissy voice irritates me. Her inefficient jittering limbs are always in my peripheral vision. She makes me short and snappy. I dislike her. Today, I fear that she might injure me.

I send her away to perform an unnecessary diagnostic, and I sink to the floor, alone and overwhelmed. My bottom hurts, pressed against the unforgiving deck.

I pull at my sleeves, the seams splitting neatly to the elbow. I have to see my skin.

It's beautiful. White ... white/pink and soft. It wants licking, it wants stroking, it wants looking after, wrapping in white bandages and caring for. It is too delicate without my nanoprobes to take care of it. I could damage it.

Like this. I have cut myself before I even think about it. Across the inside of my arm with the sharp edge of the circuit modulator. I wait for a moment, and blood wells up. The pain is sharp, but it's a thrill.

Then I hug my arm to myself, feeling sorry for it. What has it done to me?

I cut it again, and again. Long scars, dark like bracken over my arms. I cut until I am finished. I feel sick inside as I do my sleeves back up. Sick but excited, and secretive. Nobody knows my flesh is vulnerable.

I take my hair out, and then tie it back up, smoothing it out again. Making me look pristine. My biosuit will take care of my excited sweat.

Tal Celes returns, and I don't find her quite so irritating any more.

When my shift is over, I purposefully stride the corridors of Voyager. Always looking as though I am on my way somewhere. I ride the turbolift. I take off wall panels and inspect their contents. I make no changes. I haven't really got anything to do.

As I am walking the hall between the mess hall and turbolift, I ask the computer for Captain Janeway's whereabouts.

"Captain Janeway is in her quarters."

I imagine her there, in the dimmed light, reading with her jacket on the back of her chair. I imagine her at her desk, looking at star charts on her console. I imagine her naked in her bathtub, her pinkish nipples on the surface. I imagine her with my scars across her arms, cutting herself as well.

She needs looking after, and only I can help her through the night.

I am outside her door. Two crewman walk by, and my head goes back, arrogant on my neck. Justifying my own thoughts to them. They don't even look at me.

I ring her doorchime twice before she answers. She is doing none of the things I envisaged. She is dressed in a calf-length white nightdress, plain-faced with swollen, sluggish eyes. Clearly, she was sleeping.

"Seven," she groans. "It's 0200!"

I had not noticed the time. I look away from her, ashamed. "I ... I was concerned," I tell her.

"Concerned?" she repeats dumbly.

"Yes," I stress. "I became concerned about you, I was worried something had happened."

Now she is compassionate. "Why?" she asks.

"I had an unsettling feeling. I cannot explain it, but I became determined to ensure you were all right."

Her face softens. "Oh, Seven ..." she breathes. For a moment, just a moment, I see her as she was in the prison.

I enter her quarters with my arms behind my back, tall and immaculate. She puts on a robe and we sit together on her couch, not saying anything.

"Do you ... worry about me a lot?" she says at last, her voice so hoarse and such a whisper that for a moment I am not sure she has said it at all.

I do not know the answer. "Yes," I reply, but it isn't quite the truth.

She takes my hand in one of her tiny ones. My Borg hand. "We had a difficult time, didn't we, Seven." Her tone is flat, completely. Her eyes are dead when she says that.

"Yes," I say, but again, it isn't quite the truth. I am finding it much harder now.

Her grip on my hand tightens, and we stay that way for long minutes. Reliving it. Her face is set and grim.

"I'm sorry," she says at last, in that voice that is a tenuous thread. Her fingers squeeze mine, and I remember her nails in my skin every night and her moaning voice full of fear.

When I look at her, her eyes are full of water and quivering. She is showing me how she is not the same. How her act on the bridge is just an act. Her mouth is open slightly in that childlike fearful wail.

This is why I have not been able to see her during her long months of rehabilitation. She knew I couldn't stand another moment of this.

"Please, Captain," I beg her. "Please don't."

"Help me, Seven ..." she sobs. "Help me, I'm in so much pain."

I feel the same pain, in my throat and face. My vision blurs as tears spring to my eyes. My face crumples. "So am I ..." I whine. Not my voice. A small voice, almost Annika's.

So much pain. I can hardly breathe, and when I do, it's a tight, pained gasp. My throat is strangling.

"Look," I say, unfastening my sleeves. "I'm hurt .. please Captain ... take care of me."

She looks, and gasps. "Seven, how ..?" she asks.

But the answer is irrelevant to her. She comes to me, and she is the Captain, almost as reflex. I feel the strength back in her body, in every muscle as she touches me, drawing me back to the sofa, taking my cut arms in her hands and turning them over and over.

"You deactivated your nanoprobes?" she asks.

I cannot reply. I nod to her.

"Oh, you silly ... silly ...."

"I'm in so much pain!" I tell her, the emotion coming out in my voice, so raw. "I can't stop hurting!"

I show her my scars, almost as proof. I need them there, where she can see them. They are the evidence. Emotional pain as physical pain, as ugly as both of them.

I want her to hold me, I want her to bandage them, wrapping them over and over, telling me it's all going to be all right. Then I want to fall asleep clinging to her hand, the way she clung to mine all night.

"Seven ..." she's crying. "Oh, Seven ... Seven ..." Holding my arms in her little white hands. Stroking them, over the dry crusts of the wounds. It hurts and I flinch, but she doesn't stop.

I take her and seize her, and drag her small body to me. I have to cling to her, I have to know that she's all right, that she'll make me all right. Her arms go around my neck, her hand in my hair, holding my head against her, my face to her shoulder, so that everything I breathe is part of her. She'll take care of me.

It's odd, she's so much smaller, sitting here right across my lap, my hips between her spread and straddling legs, but she's squeezing strongly, and I'm hers. I crush her and sob, and she moans reassuring noises in my ear.

"Captain .." I cry plaintively.

"It's okay, it's over, it's over," she sighs again and again and again. "All over ...."

"But I love you ..." I wail. An odd thing to say, but I really do. I love her, and I watched her dying.

"I know," she sighs in my ear. "I know you do."

She presses a kiss against my lips, and her teeth and my teeth grind together, a bit of her lip caught between. Then our teeth part and the silk of her tongue is hot in my mouth. I taste her breath.

It feels right. Her hips pushing against me, her hands on my face, cradling me. The woman on the bridge, her smell on my face, her shape under my hands, warm through her garment. She is erotic and pleasing.

She compresses her lips in different places on my face, and her breath is harder and faster. My skin feels good in the places she has kissed. I leave my eyes open while she sucks my lips again, noisily. So close, her face intent and flushed, I see the Captain in a new light yet again.

I wonder if she would like her breasts caressed. I hold them both in my hands; they are the perfect size, and feel so pleasing. Soft and warm and round. Something about that softness reminds me of my own uncut arms that afternoon.

I feel all her soft parts. Breasts, belly, buttocks, thighs, then I take handfuls of her hair and hold her head back by them, spreading her mouth open wide with my lips and dipping my tongue inside with hers.

Her mouth is hot and wet, and I want more and more of it. She pulls away and takes her nightdress up over her head, naked underneath.

"Seven ..." she begs. I touch all the parts I have already touched, and they feel so different. The beauty of her flesh, the sweet human smell of it. This time we kiss with our eyes, gazes locked. There is ache and need in hers. I show her comfort.

She shows me how she likes her clitoris to be touched by touching it herself. Not directly on the tip, but pulling it, sliding the skin up and down. Her hips shudder while she's doing it. There are muscles tight in her thighs and belly. She gets wet. She's very explicit.

I touch her between her legs myself, taste the fluid I get on me. It's rich and salty and thick, the same consistency as nutritional supplement one-three-six. I draw trails of it up her belly, intently tracing the pattern for the frequency of our warp core. Just as it appears inside my Borg-brain. When my fingers dry, I dabble them back against her, and inside. She stimulates herself continually.

The pattern complete, I draw her belly to my nose and smell it drying on her skin. The scent makes me dizzy and I do not understand. She thrusts up against me with her dark damp sex, insistently.

"Make me come, Seven," she pleads.

"Come?" I ask.

"Orgasm," she says.

I put my hands on her, trying to duplicate her own touch. She is very slippery, and I find her scent intoxicating. I find myself with my nose pressed against her hair, lips kissing the shaft of her clitoris. Shockingly intimate. Her sticky fingers wind into my tied-up hair and hold me against her, up on her knees on the couch.

She cries out as I begin to let my tongue sample the very tip of her clitoris. She is clearly sensitive there. I am overwhelmed. I dig my fingers into her soft buttocks and hold her against my mouth.

She cries out and plunges against me in orgasm. I was worried that her involuntary sexual cries would remind me of the prison, but they don't. She sounds so joyful and free in her release. Happy, fingers clutching, back arched and hard.

Her face is hot and tastes of sweat as she nuzzles for my lips in the aftermath. I play with her bright flushed nipples with my fingers, then kiss them, sliding my tongue round, tracing the circles of them. Lazy. Warm. I have discovered a great passion for the flesh. The Captain's flesh, to be precise, and mine.

"Your turn," she says with a husky voice, her eyes bright and languid at the same time.

She wants to see my skin. I stand up from the couch and face her, trying to summon some of the drone's regality. Straighten. Hold my head back. Then I reach up behind my neck and release the catch on my biosuit.

She watches, sitting back on top of her discarded nightdress, as I strip for her. The whole time I hold her eyes with the eyes of the Borg. Arrogant. Superior. She falls to her knees at my feet.

Holds my hips in her arms, her head against my stomach. murmurs words against the taut skin there. I stroke her ragged hair.

She looks up into my eyes, her earnest flushed face. "Let me take care of you, Seven," she says.

I let her. I let her take me back to the couch, let her sit me down, watching patient as a child. She spreads my knees and gets on all fours between them. Her bottom arches into the air, and looking at it, I become aroused.

She places her hand on my pubic hair, strokes me with her thumb, spreading me, exposing my clitoris. I feel unexpectedly exposed and naked.

She grins at me shyly from between my own legs. "I've never done this before," she says softly. "To another woman. Forgive me for being an amateur?"

"Yes," I croak, and she buries her face in me.

The thought of that act alone is enough to bring a wave of pleasure through my body. I watch her mouth work, her eyes closed as she nuzzles, kissing me there like she would kiss my lips, her tongue playing and teasing.

It's pleasant, but I am too new at this to reach climax this way. The position is wrong, her tongue isn't strong enough.

Embarrassed, with my moisture all around her lips, she gets up and moves in to kiss me, rubbing me with her fingers instead.

"Show me," she whispers into my ear.

I look at her blankly.

"Show me what you like. How you touch yourself, Seven."

"I do not," I say.

"You don't ... masturbate?" she blinks.

"No," I tell her.

"Never?"

"Never."

She draws her fingers up and away from my sex, stroking my belly softly instead. "Oh, Seven," she says sadly.

I do not know what to say.

After a moment, she guides me up from the sofa again. "Come to bed," she whispers.

"Yes Captain," I say as a reflex.

She laughs a throaty laugh, but doesn't correct me, or invite me to use her given name. I decide she must be happy being Captain in every situation.

We lie together under her pale sheets, sharing her pillow. She is still very interested in my body, playing with my breasts almost endlessly, absorbed by them.

She plays with the nipples, pulling them in rough little pinches. Then she squeezes and fondles my breast as a whole. Finally, she dips her head and suckles at them experimentally.

I find myself moaning in pleasure at the sensation.

This pleases her. She comes to my mouth for another deep kiss.

"Oh Seven," she says, cradling my face. "Such a sad, pleasure-less life. So much has been stolen from you ..."

Then she lifts my arms, displaying the scars I inflicted. "You poor thing," she whispers. "Let me take care of you, Seven."

The tears come to my eyes again, and once again, she moves her head between my legs, this time gathering my legs into the crooks of her elbows.

The emotions begin to overwhelm me, and I ride with them, higher and higher, a force so powerful it comes from outside me, linked inextricably with the movements of her wonderful mouth.

This is the first time I have felt bigger than an individual. Like there might be something out there bigger than me as a human being.

I cry out, and my hips rise from the bed with the force of a transwarp crescent. There are no words or thoughts. Just her mouth on mine afterward, tasting of me in the swooning aftermath of my orgasm. I am crying, softly.

"There there," she says, brushing back my hair maternally. "Didn't I say I'd take care of you? My little angel ..."

I feel warm and loved. More invincible than I did in the prison, with all my nanoprobes repairing my flesh.

She looks wonderful above me, and she's holding my hand. She kisses me softly, and asks me tentatively if I will spend the night.

She is frightened I won't.

"Of course ... Kathryn," I tell her.

Again, she looks amused. "Good," she says with a chuckle in her voice. "I ... I've missed you. When I wake up frightened I ..."

She does not need to finish. I am here. I gather her into my arms and kiss her sweet freckled cheek. She needs taking care of, too.

However, as we lie there and she falls asleep, I push my brain to remember her pain, but the cries I hear are only those of her pleasure.

THE END

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