Your Left Hand

In my fantasies, you touch me with your left hand.

I am not as crazy as you think I am, and I am well aware of just how unstable you believe me to be. I spent four hours on duty last week on the Bridge of the Diabless considering this very topic. It didn't matter, though, because we were still completing that mind numbing survey of the Akapir Cluster, and the ship needed me as Captain like it needed Leah Brahms cleaning the warp manifolds. What a singularly incredible waste of time.

But that's another message altogether.

Consider for a moment that we have been fucking one another for more than two years. I can remember touching you in a hundred different places - like the time I made you come in the turbolift at Deep Space 12 when you were on your way to meet Admiral Xu and you arrived looking completely disheveled, or behind the pear trees in Evelyn's garden at our engagement party. I can think of dozens of different people who've watched us - remember when Tom Paris dropped by and we got so drunk that afterward he couldn't look me in the eye?

Still, in all that time, I cannot remember a single time that you've touched me with your left hand.

I've considered that perhaps you're embarrassed of it. It must be difficult to bear the brand of the Borg across all parts of your body - like the tiny little implant just below your right buttock - like screaming reminders of the upbringing I know you'd like to forget. What must be even worse is that without all those godawful reminders, you'll die. That if a doctor were to remove all the metal, and all the circuitry, and make you human again, you'd be destroyed.

It must be hard to have your life depend on what you believe to be your greatest flaw. There are those of us that do not think your metallic components are so offensive. Yes, I know that I was the one that first encouraged you to embrace the flesh over the nanoprobes, but I also have come to acknowledge that without your Borg heritage, you have none. It is hard for people to understand.

It must be difficult for the junior officers of the Stella to look to their First Officer and to see more machine than woman. Having a once- Borg as First Officer must be more difficult for Captain Garcia than having a once-Maquis was for me.

Some people have difficulty seeing the woman you do such a good job of hiding. Is this cause for congratulations or condolences? I believe you'd rather be ex-Borg because that's easier than being ex- human, so I suppose you are succeeding splendidly.

I've also thought that you are afraid to hurt me, and that this fear was why you refrain from touching me with your left hand. I know that your enhanced hand is much stronger than your human one; it probably wouldn't take much to injure me quite seriously, and I can just imagine trying to explain that to one of these uptight Starfleet doctors.

Still, in my fantasies, you fuck me so hard that I scream and bleed.

In my fantasies, you are as rough with me as I am with you.

I have always been surprised at how you are always so careful not to hurt me. I wonder how you have never noticed what I want is to be hurt. How what I want is to be reminded that I have a body, and that you can take it.

I keep asking you to use me, and you make sure that you don't, that I feel gentle caresses only, that I come slowly and lazily. Even when you're drunk, you wrap me up like porcelain, afraid I will shatter, and I keep asking you to break me.

Maybe this is what scares you. Don't worry, darling, I don't mean to say you're frightened; I do know how much you hate that word. But it's clear enough that a little fear eats away at you. It's been there since you were severed years ago, and has been steadily increasing since we found the wormhole and returned to the Alpha Quadrant. Since we became lovers, and especially since we were married, it has increased exponentially.

You are afraid of me.

Well, more accurately, you are afraid of the me you see when no one else is looking. Not Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Diabless who wears four shining pips on her collar and commands a crew of four hundred fifty eight able officers without so much as breaking a sweat.

Not even Katy Janeway, hostess extraordinaire, who can throw a dinner party like no one else in Starfleet on an hour's notice and owns forty place settings in the finest platinum.

Not even, for that matter, Kat Janeway, wife of Commander Annika Hansen, First Officer of the Stella. Kat Janeway who shows up for all the right banquets and always wears the perfect pair of shoes for the occasion.

No, all of those people are familiar, simple.

There is someone else that you see in the dimmed lights of the bedroom, when she is naked and whimpering and begging you to break her. There is a woman there who needs to be taken, who needs to be stroked and strangled and bruised. There is a woman who wants to be reminded that life is not always about command. There is a woman who wants to feel inferior, just for a moment while she comes, before she must go back to the world and be the spit-shined Captain that she is expected to be.

And because you hate her so much, that weak and needing woman, you never indulge her. Perhaps that is why you never touch me with your left hand. You like the safety of the Captain, the hostess, the wife who is always in control.

I bet the answer is really the simplest one.

You have given me everything of yourself. You have given me your humanity, and your inhumanity, and your love, and your brutality, and your sensuality, and your trust... You have given it all to me, and in that way I control you. With a look or a word, I can change your mind for you, and you hate that.

No, you're not weak - but you have made me strong.

But there is something you haven't given me. Oh, that sounds silly, I know. It's just a hand. But you've never given it to me, never given me that touch, that caress. And it drives me crazy, so crazy that I find myself absorbed in elaborate fantasies with you and your left hand even while I sleep next to you on leave, or while your right hand's fingers creep up my thigh at some official function.

It's funny, really. Those five fingers, all wrapped up in metallic compounds and circuitry, are what's left of you when you've given everything else of yourself to me.

It's those five fingers... it's what you won't give up that lets you control me, and for that - I love you.

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The End