Her fingers close around the blade, and she lifts it to her breast, but she does not bleed.

Not as I do.

The blood gushes, trailing down my abdomen, matting the curls that cover my mons.

She watches me, curiously, still moving as I do, pressing it deeper into herself but never flinching.

The carpet beneath my feet is soaked, my toes red with the scarlet gush. I am surprised at its volume, for just one cut, and it feels odd against my fingers, slick but sticky and thick. I slide my fingers into it, as Chakotay slid his into me, and for a moment I imagine, as I did then, that it is Kathryn.

Pain is simply an unpleasant sensory experience –irrelevant.

She removes the fingers from the bloodless wound, and brings the blade down her center, and as I cut, I bleed, and she still does not. I have to stop at the implant just above my mound, and I start again, deeper. It gushes far more, hurts far more…I dimly wonder if I will see her inside.

This part of my body feels different than my breast. Instead of fatty tissue and muscle, it is slick hot organs of an endless length, coiled in a beautiful pattern that leaves her transfixed as she stares at me. They threaten to spill out of the incision, to burst forth from the parted fat and flesh and muscle, and I have to hold them in.

I feel so light yet so heavy, so hot and so cold.

She has opened herself too, but there's nothing there, and I do not see her inside of me.

But she is there, cold and unbroken.

And they are there, tortured and screaming.

They are me, I am them.

I am not Seven of Nine, not Annika Hansen.

I am drifting, ascending, screaming.

I am falling, my knees hitting the floor, my intestines spilling out before me.

Darkness swarms, the comforting regression.

Once I regain a fracture of composure, I allow my eyes to slowly travel up. Her shoes are black and unscuffed, pants impeccable and elegantly creased, burgundy admirals jacket perfect in every sense of the word. She's staring at me, a brow peaked, eating half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Call me a traditionalist," she says, "But I'd have gone with a phaser to the head."

"I'm sorry, Kathryn," is all I can manage in a whisper cracked and frail.

The concurrent stir of emotions that it evoked in the other woman was utterly belied by her calm, impassive face. It was an impressive trait of trickery that she had learned from her best Vulcan friend, but was employed only in the most dire of circumstances, though had come into play more than she'd have liked in these last few weeks.

No words could be found to describe the pang in her chest, her heart pounding furiously against her ribcage, the dread that nearly consumed her whole when she first found Seven laying face down on the floor in a halo of blood. She had turned her over, her intestines spilling out of the gaping hole in her abdomen, and nearly vomited then.

But she held it in, like she held everything in. It was a miracle she had lived, probably fueled by the discomfort caused by Janeway's foot up Starfleet Medical's ass, but in the end, she had. It was a mixture of anger, hatred, relief, and love that mulled in her chest and she contemplated them, still unwilling to give in, still gazing at Seven.

The other half of the sandwich that had so rudely connected with my head is on the sheets beside me, and I unwrap it and take a bite, if only to get rid of the astringent taste of vomit. I chew it slowly, spreading the sweetness through every crevice of my mouth, before swallowing with difficulty.

Kathryn stands up and moves to the window, gazing out of it at the grounds below.

"You're an asshole, Seven," she says, blinking furiously, leaning down on the sill, her head in her hands. A strangled sound, muffled and uninvited, precedes shudders as she finally gives into the tears.

I feel terrible, but oddly elated at feeling something at all.

She moves from the window and sits on the edge of my bed, her eyes dark with tears.

"I had a dog, when I was a kid. He was a stray, and I forced my parents to take him in. I loved him so much, but he hated me. He'd bite me all the time, but I couldn't bear to get rid of him," she says in a strained husk, "And you're like that dog, Seven. You hurt me, but I can't stop loving you. You choose Chakotay, of all people, CHAKOTAY, and then you try to kill yourself in quite possibly the most gruesome way ever."

"Kathryn…"

"Shut up, Seven." she says, glaring at me but at the same time she lays down next to me, wrapping her arms around me and crying into my neck.

YEARS LATER...

The lush green leaves shudder in delight as the cool Indiana breeze licks at them; the air is sweet but tinged with the seemingly ever-present essence of cow pâté, and the hum of hovo-tractors off in the distance drearily drifts past my ears. It is the country –traditionalist fare. They grow food in gardens and fields, and there are throngs of ancient trees that thrust into the wide-open empty spaces, and it is utterly beautiful.

San-Francisco is an industrial hulking villain, vile and ugly, always alive with a malignant energy. It is everything that Indiana is not, and being here, at her mother's house, I wonder what was going through Kathryn's young mind when she decided to leave this veritable paradise and venture off into cold, unknown space.

This is the very essence of Earth.

And it is now, as I sit here and listen to my wife laughing with her mother, I am happy.

And it is now, with this fetus holding court in my gut, that I am happy.