Work Text:
"REGENERATION CYCLE INCOMPLETE"
The computer's abrupt announcement stops B'Elanna in her tracks, her gaze snapping up from the PADD in her hand. The door slides shut behind her, the usually unintrusive sound obnoxious in the relative quiet of the cargo bay.
B'Elanna's heart thums loudly in her ears as she realises her mistake. She steps back as quietly as she can, but it's too late; barely a few seconds pass between the computer's announcement and Seven's alcove lighting up. The drone steps out with mechanical precision and turns to face the interruption. Her cold eyes land on B'Elanna, her body moving as precisely as a machine. It's unnerving, but B'Elanna knows she's the one who's misstepped here, so she tries to find the right words to smooth Seven's ruffled feathers.
"I, uh, didn't know you were sleeping—"
"It's oh-two-hundred hours, Lieutenant," Seven interrupts frostily.
B'Elanna should have known better than to expect Seven to cut her some slack, but she's annoyed just the same.
"I didn't realise how late it was," she says, turning to leave before she loses control of her temper. She's almost at the door when Seven speaks again.
"You had something you wanted to show me?"
There's a tremor in her voice, something B'Elanna's never heard before. Had they been anywhere else—engineering, or the bridge, or even the mess—she'd have missed it in the ambient buzz. The cargo bay is silent but for the gentle, rhythmic hum of the embedded Borg technology. It's almost organic, like a heartbeat. B'Elanna wonders whether the sound helps Seven sleep or if she's exhausted all the time, if a lack of rest is why her voice sounds—
"Lieutenant?"
"Oh." B'Elanna looks back at the information on her PADD. "Yes. Your occipital implant. The distortions you've been having. I think I've found a workaround that'll help reduce the intensity until we've found a permanent fix."
"I see."
B'Elanna gestures to the door with her PADD. "It can wait until tomorrow. I honestly didn't realise how late—"
"No."
B'Elanna looks back at Seven, startled by the depth of feeling in that one single word. Seven has said 'no' dozens, maybe even hundreds of times since the Captain brought her on board, always with a confrontational tone ranging from smug superiority to haughty disapproval, but she has never sounded like this. It's unnerving.
"Okaaaaay," says B'Elanna. "We could go over the simulations now?"
Seven's gaze finally drops from B'Elanna's face. She nods, once, her face a marble mask, tension chiselled into her sharp features as she turns and moves towards a computer interface on the wall. No, not tension. Something else.
B'Elanna steps forward and stops Seven with a hand on her shoulder. Seven turns back easily with a gentle tug. It's all wrong. Seven should be shaking her off, should be making some quip about B'Elanna's inability to keep time and attributing it to her Klingon-Human heritage. But she just stands there, B'Elanna's touch unremarked upon.
"Or we could just…give it a go? See what happens?"
Seven nods again, her eyes closing briefly as she says, "That would be agreeable."
B'Elanna places her PADD on a console and pulls a scanner out of her toolbelt. Seven lets her scan her occipital implant without complaint or instruction. B'Elanna takes several readings, asking Seven to open her eyes, close them, look near, and look far, and then through the various wavelengths of light. By the time she's completed the preliminary scans, her shoulders ache from reaching up so long, and Seven's looking a little twitchy. B'Elanna waits for a pointed comment when she stretches her arms out, but it doesn't come.
Seven stands perfectly still and poised as B'Elanna uploads the date to her PADD and sets it to run with real readings. B'Elanna leans back against the console and tries to think of something she could say to alleviate the tension in the room. She looks around the cargo bay for inspiration, but comes up unsurprisingly blank. The only notable thing in the bay is the Borg technology, but Seven's been on Voyager long enough that it's no longer an oddity. Though not long enough to gain the social awareness to make others feel at ease, the Doctor's attempts at nurturing her human side notwithstanding.
They're saved by the beep of the PADD, and B'Elanna snatches it up and scrolls through the updated information. The results are promising, but it's still an adjustment to Borg technology that no one in the Federation has ever attempted before.
"Looks good," B'Elanna tells Seven. "But it's still an untested modification. We should probably go to the holodeck and—"
"I would prefer to proceed as soon as possible."
B'Elanna almost agrees then and there; she's been daydreaming about going back to bed since the early hours of the previous morning. Something makes her pause. In the green-tinted light of the Borg technology, Seven looks ghostly pale. Now that B'Elanna's looking at her, really looking, the dark smudges under Seven's eyes are so obviously more than a shadow, and there's a hollowness to her cheeks that her nanoprobes and nutritional supplements aren't countering.
Something's wrong.
The thing is, B'Elanna should have known when Seven chose to approach her for help over literally anyone else on the ship. Seven asked that the Doctor not be involved, and that should have been a red flag, too. For a moment, B'Elanna wonders what could have driven her to this, if she should ask the Doctor or the Captain to join them despite the late hour. But Seven once honoured her request not to involve either of them at a time when she wasn't ready; she feels honour-bound to do the same now.
"Sure. Let's do this."
B'Elanna sets out the tools she needs next to the PADD and walks through the procedure in her head. It's a simple enough set of adjustments; rerouting specific pathways within the implant, and ensuring the old ones can't be autonomously regenerated, but it's a long time since B'Elanna had anything to do with Seven's Borg implants. Seven had been unconscious then, newly separated from the hive mind, a war waging between her human tissue and her Borg infrastructure. Between the Doctor and B'Elanna, they managed to reach some kind of organic-cybernetic harmony, but it's no surprise that something's finally malfunctioned that needs her expertise and not his.
Seven was an enigma then, and is just as much a mystery now. She follows B'Elanna's instructions without argument for the first time since they met, allowing B'Elanna to step into her personal space and survey parts of her person without complaint. B'Elanna doesn't think she'd be so accommodating if the roles were reversed. Neither of them speaks as she makes the first modification, building a new connection and severing the old one. It takes several minutes of intense concentration, during which Seven remains perfectly still. It's less like working on a person and more like tinkering with a photon torpedo, only with a greater chance that something will blow up in her face.
"In theory, this will reduce the neural overload and give you more control over your visual acuity." B'Elanna swaps her tool for her scanner and checks her work. "It should reduce the amount of information being transmitted from your implant to your optic nerve."
"No more erroneous flashes of light?" asks Seven as B'Elanna tucks her scanner into her toolbelt.
"No more erroneous flashes of light," confirms B'Elanna.
She doesn't realise she's rubbing her upper arm until Seven reaches out abruptly and presses her thumb deep in the side of B'Elanna's neck and drags it down across her shoulder. A sharp pain makes her want to punch Seven's lights out, but the sudden relief once it's subsided is like someone lifted a shuttle off her shoulders.
B'Elanna pulls away and runs her hand where Seven's firm touch still lingers.
"What did you—"
"A pinched nerve, I believe," Seven says. "I have reduced the muscular pressure by seventy-two per cent."
"How did you even know how to do that?"
Seven stares at B'Elanna blankly. No, not at B'Elanna, just in her direction.
"An archaic human treatment where a person's discomfort is alleviated by another's touch," Seven eventually explains.
"Another's discomfort…Seven, did you just give me a massage?"
Seven doesn't respond, her face etched with confusion and something else. B'Elanna contemplates Seven's completely bizarre and uncharacteristic behaviour, and then the irrefutable Borg logic hits her square in the face.
Discomfort, Seven had called it. Pain is the word B'Elanna would use. All afternoon, her arm has been bugging her, driving her mad in what moments she's had to spare between a warp core reset and the inevitable cascade of effects it had on various systems all over the ship. Seven is the only person to notice, which is less of a surprise than the fact that she's acting like she gives a damn. The only time Seven cares about anything is when it directly affects her. Or, in this case, when it's something she is also experiencing.
"How long have you been having headaches?" asks B'Elanna, but Seven's pinched expression makes her feel like she's kicked a baby targ. She shakes her head. "Never mind. I'd like to get this done in time to get some sleep before the next shift."
"Agreed."
B'Elanna picks up the scanner again to map the next pathway to sever. As she reaches up, Seven steps back, and B'Elanna figures Seven's patience has run out. She's surprised to find she feels disappointed—this is the first genuinely agreeable interaction they've had since Seven woke up in sickbay, severed from the Borg collective. To say things had been frictious between them would be an understatement. But there have been moments between them, when Seven's held her tongue and B'Elanna's held her temper, that B'Elanna wondered if they could be something other than antagonistic colleagues.
"This would be easier from a higher elevation."
"Excuse me?" It takes B'Elanna a moment to parse Seven's words. Not a dismissal at all.
"I have noticed you often work in suboptimal positions, against the artificial gravity of the ship. You should instead consider repositioning to work from above to reduce physical strain."
Seven's not wrong, but it's not like there is a stepladder in the cargo bay. The only things here are three functional regeneration chambers and a handful of consoles.
"May I?" asks Seven.
B'Elanna has no idea what she's asking permission for, but it's the middle of the night, and this entire interaction has gone completely off their usual snarky track, so she nods and tries not to flail like a startled fish when Seven lifts her by the hips up onto the console next to them. She grabs Seven's shoulders instinctively to rebalance and finds that for once she's not the one being looked down on. The change in perspective flips something in B'Elanna's head.
Seven lets go of B'Elanna and clasps her hands behind her back, the way she has done hundreds of times. B'Elanna always found it cold and inhuman, something an android might do, but from this angle, she recognises it as something else. Something she has felt so often since joining the Voyager crew—vulnerability.
B'Elanna grabs her scanner and starts again, remapping the remaining pathways in the wake of the first adjustment.
"I, uh…I apologise for the intrusion," B'Elanna says as she severs the next pathway. "I hate to be woken up in the middle of the night."
"No apology is necessary," replies Seven. "As I do not sleep, I do not know what it is like to be woken up."
"It's much like this, I guess."
Seven doesn't respond. B'Elanna has never been comfortable with casual conversation, much prefers it when others fill in the awkward silences. Somehow, since B'Elanna stepped foot in the cargo bay, something has changed between her and Seven. The conversational lull is less awkward and more…congenial. A shared quiet moment instead of something that needs to be filled, which gives B'Elanna the ability to focus on what she's doing instead of second-guessing everything she says to Seven. She's made several more adjustments before Seven speaks again.
"Three months."
B'Elanna looks down at Seven's upturned face and is startled by the intensity of the blue eyes fixed on her. "What?"
"I've been having headaches for three months."
This makes B'Elanna pause. It's been weeks since Seven asked for her help. B'Elanna's always busy, always the last woman standing between the crew and a warp core meltdown. But she'd never have left this on the back burner if she'd known it was more than a minor adjustment for Seven, would never have left Seven, or anyone, in pain for so long.
"I'm sorry," B'Elanna says to Seven, truly meaning it for the first time since they met. "I should have come sooner."
"You are here now."
An hour ago, those words would have stung B'Elanna, perhaps even deep enough to get her to storm off. She'd have made a scathing comment about Seven's humanity, or lack thereof, and wouldn't have recognised the appreciation in her words, the gratitude. They might as well have been speaking completely different languages.
But now? Now B'Elanna realises that it's significant that Seven chose to ask her for help over anyone else on the ship. There are plenty of others, after all, with the skills to do this, and some with more experience of Borg technology than B'Elanna. They're more alike than different, both outsiders in their own way. Two half-alien pegs trying to mould to fit into human-shaped holes. It warms something deep in B'Elanna's chest that has been stony cold for a very long time.
B'Elanna swallows and sets to the next pathway.
"I heard you had a date," she says conversationally as she reconsiders and chooses a different one.
"With Lieutenant Champan, yes. Fifteen days ago."
"How'd it go?"
"He sustained a minor injury."
This is the first B'Elanna has heard about that. The whole ship used to talk about Seven all the time, but lately her mere existence has become the least of the surprises the Delta Quadrant has thrown at them.
"Perhaps you are also part Klingon?" B'Elanna jokes. "How's the son of K'Vok doing?"
"Quiet." Seven's brow raises pointedly. "I do not enjoy causing injury to others."
B'Elanna huffs and tilts Seven's head back. "Neither do I," she says, checking over the implant with her scanner again.
"The Doctor insists I am ready for deeper relationships with the crew. I believe he is mistaken."
B'Elanna doesn't agree. This is the first time Seven has initiated a conversation with her that doesn't involve the warp manifolds or the inefficiency of the engineering crew.
"How so?" she asks.
"Lieutenant Champan has not spoken to me since our date. Previously, he had spoken to me, on average, three point three times a week."
B'Elanna can't help laughing at the thought that Will's been avoiding Seven, and pictures him slipping into a Jeffrey's tube at the sound of her muffled boots entering engineering. At Seven's raised brow, she apologises.
"It's not you," she says, lining up for the next pathway. "Though it probably doesn't help that you call him by his rank, instead of Will."
Seven looks at B'Elanna blankly, like she hadn't considered that point. It must be hard, she thinks, to have missed out on all the things that your awkward teenage years teach you. Not just manners and community and communication, but all those pesky social norms in the federation that B'Elanna's always thought meaningless, but since becoming a part of Voyager's crew, she's been thankful she at least knew they existed.
"Perhaps I should inform the Doctor that I will be postponing further social interactions until I have observed the crew's interactions for a while longer."
It'd be so easy for Seven to opt out. She's even more of a misfit than B'Elanna is. For all that she's objectively beautiful, intelligent, and outwardly confident, half of her is made up of something that most of the federation has nightmares about. But B'Elanna's not the only one here capable of change and growth, of realising she was wrong about many things and that there are shades of grey everywhere in the universe. Even here, in cargo bay three, the two of them are managing to exist in the same space for longer than a minute without someone having to walk away.
"Lieutenant?"
"I don't know, Seven. I think we're doing just fine here," she says. "And since this is officially our third date, maybe call me B'Elanna?"