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Raffi’s never been one to be vain. She takes pride in her appearance, loves every aspect of it on most days (there are days when she struggles to reconcile the way that she loves her body with the way that her addictions have taken a toll on it, but those moments are less rather than more these days, and have been so ever since the both of them have emerged from the spacedock battle). But she’s never been one to fixate on it.
So when she starts to spend more time looking at herself in reflective surfaces when they’re together, Seven keeps quiet and tries to observe.
They have handled each other with gentle hands since they’ve come back, divulged bits of the past to each other in the dark, when they can. Seven is still very much working for Starfleet, catapulted into her role as captain (and she would have it no other way).
Raffi takes some time to figure out her next steps, which is the least that Starfleet can grant her (they admit it) after what she’s done.
They are not super happy about their classified files being revealed, but it ends up falling low on the relatively immensely impactful list of events that have occurred recently. They give her her time off, after she fulfills the cleanup work involved with her assignment with Worf.
But that doesn’t mean that she and Seven stop seeing each other. There is a shift in the way that they spend time together now, though. Their careers clearly come first. Their individual wellbeing clearly comes first. And while neither of them truly doubt their commitment to each other, they do not place a name to it.
That kind of thing is for later, after helping traumatized kids. After Raffi takes stock of over a decade of missed time with her family and tries to decide the direction they can go next – and if that’s even a possibility.
The point is that right now, they are both what the other needs, and they are, for themselves, what they need. Everything else is secondary.
“You are still the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen,” says Seven, leaning in the doorway of the bathroom. She’s waited a reasonably long amount of time for Raffi to say something about her presence – there’s no way this honed spy version of her wouldn’t – but she doesn’t, which means she’s distracted. “I don’t know if that helps.”
Raffi meets her eyes in the mirror and doesn’t turn. Rather, she just smiles a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It does, honestly. But maybe not with my issue.”
“Would talking about it help?”
Raffi chuckles – and that does reach her eyes. “You look ridiculous standing in that doorway. That what the fourth pip’s done to you?”
“You’re deflecting.”
“I know. But you basically called me hot, and I wanted to make sure that you knew I felt the same way about you.” She eyes Seven, with a little sparkle in her eyes. “You clearly know it about yourself.”
Seven laughs. She hasn’t done that in a while. It’s really strange, that even in this oddly distant version of their relationship that they’re living out right now, Raffi is still one of the few people who can make her do that, with almost no effort. Just by being.
Raffi turns back towards the mirror. “I should just cut my hair, right? Trim it, restyle it. Stop putting on all this makeup every morning, but it’s like, even after everything’s been settled, going back to the person I used to be–”
“Does she still exist?”
“Sorry?”
“The person you used to be,” asks Seven. “Does she still exist?”
Raffi meets Seven’s eyes in the mirror.
She doesn’t say a word.
Seven hasn’t cooked for Raffi in a really long time. They’ve been on a Starfleet clock, replicating and grabbing quick pockets of time here and there. There had been a sense back then that Seven, even at home in herself, had so much more to prove.
But that need to prove…something…is gone. Neither of them are in uniform right now. It’s just Seven, in leggings and a crop top. She’s not wearing anything on her feet – even the sock-slippers she normally wears to keep her feet implants from clicking on the ground. Raffi’s wearing a lounge jumpsuit, her hair still in that ponytail.
Now, Seven makes use of a recipe Raffi had given her, one that Raffi swears her grandmother teased out of the Siskos themselves. Gumbo with heft, just the right amount of roux .
Cooking makes talking easier for both of them. Together, they chop the holy trinity to pieces: green peppers, onion, and celery. For Seven, cooking, serving other people, is something intuitive, is home . It’s grounding.
There’s another reason why Seven does this. She knows that for Raffi, food is home. She’s learned a little something about making things just a little more comfortable for other people. Maybe that’s from commanding a crew that hailed from so many different places.
The fresh spice of the celery tickles Raffi’s nose, but she ignores it and keeps chopping.
“They have Voyager at the Fleet Museum,” says Seven. “We went there, to get the things that we needed to help get you all out of Daystrom.” It’s all information that Raffi knows, that Raffi saw in everyone’s reports. Hell, she’d helped write that report. But she hadn’t thought about it in a while, until now. Hadn’t had the time or brainspace to realize that Seven had, in a lot of ways, visited her old childhood home. Put out to pasture, empty, held up as an important relic of the past.
“Oh,” says Raffi. She feels a little bad about that, actually, because that had to have been an emotional experience for Seven. “Are you–”
“I’m fine,” says Seven, and she stops chopping, meets Raffi’s eyes to help ensure that she is. “But I’ve been thinking about that time lately.”
Raffi piles the celery so she can have more space to chop more. “The past?”
“Birth,” says Seven, “and rebirth. I look for her too, you know, the girl I was back then. Because I was in many ways, like a child. I still wanted to be a drone because that’s what I knew. It was so uncomfortable being human that I could barely stand it. I didn’t know back then how much I would want it, how big of a fight it would be to claim that. But over time, that’s what happened. And you get me.”
“Pretty good turnout, if I say so myself,” smiles Raffi.
“I’d never go back to that,” says Seven, shaking her head. “The clothes I had to wear, the things I wanted. It was all okay, back then. But I’m not her anymore. Except I am. She’s a part of me. She helped build me. And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I also look for her.”
Raffi also pauses chopping. “You’re telling me I should stop looking for her.”
“I’m saying that you need to be who you are at the time that you need to be her, and that you shouldn’t rush it. But there’s no good or bad you, Raffi. There’s just your building blocks and your stages, and I think every single bit of that is beautiful.”
Raffi’s eyes begin to prickle, and she reaches for the onion quarter in an attempt to play down the emotion. “I just feel so completely different on the inside,” she says. “I wish the outside would match.”
“I think letting go takes time,” says Seven. She looks down at her hands, frowning, and Raffi wonders if she’s picturing Captain Shaw under them, if she’s picturing the hands that ended Bjayzl’s life, the ones that helped end Narissa’s. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”
“Good advice,” says Raffi.
“I’ve been trying to take it myself.”
Raffi looks around the table. “You invoked the Siskos’ recipe to tell me that?”
Seven chuckles. “I wanted it to be memorable.”
“Because you needed help in that arena.” Raffi sets down her knife and reaches across for Seven’s hand. Seven takes it, momentarily, then lets it go.
“More to come,” says Seven. “If you’re patient.”
Raffi breathes in slowly, carefully, feeling her air passages burn just a little.
Seven finally lets Raffi clean up after dinner, but she insists on helping, which mostly means being extremely handsy with Raffi. When Raffi finally gets the last dish squared away, she pushes Seven up onto the kitchen counter and kisses her deeply for a very long time, Seven wrapping her legs firmly around Raffi’s hips.
“Too much?” she murmurs, as Raffi tangles her hair in those extra-curly-seeming curls of Seven’s.
“I mean, if you’re looking to be memorable, you’re definitely succeeding,” replies Raffi, letting out an appreciative hum as Seven’s hands slide down her sides and cup her ass.
“I will like you like this,” says Seven, tracing the curve of Raffi’s eyebrows. She runs her palms over Raffi’s hair. “And I will like whoever you become.”
“Even if you don’t recognize her?”
Seven’s lips trail the corner of Raffi’s mouth, drop to her neck, and then she pulls away, placing a hand on Raffi’s chest. “It’s all here,” she says. “Who you are. And that is an honorable, extraordinary person.”
Raffi presses her lips back to Seven’s, letting her hands roam, slipping under the hem of Seven’s top.
They’re completely undressed by the time they get to Raffi’s bed. Seven pushes Raffi onto the bed and kneels in her lap. Raffi takes her time running her mouth over each of Seven’s breasts. It’s not the most sensitive place for Seven, and it strikes Raffi that maybe that’s the reason why she doesn’t give that part the attention it deserves.
Seven’s tracing Raffi’s hair again, her face. “I love your hair, your bone structure, your eyes – made up or not – your cheekbones…”
She continues on, as Raffi swirls her tongue around one nipple, tracing Seven’s hips. The moment is laden with possibility. Seven’s wet with anticipation, dripping into Raffi’s lap, and Raffi can feel her own body turn over, burn for want of her.
Seven moves on to Raffi’s neck, her shoulders, taking her time, tracing the curve of each defined muscle, telling Raffi what she loves.
“You’re wet all over me,” says Raffi, her lips managing to touch the underside of Seven’s breast with every word.
She’s answered with a sigh from Seven. It contains such desire, such wonder , that Raffi curls her hands around Seven’s waist to keep her from pushing Seven onto her back, climbing on top of her, using her hands to stroke the same intensity of desire into Seven that Seven’s glacial pace is inspiring in Raffi.
Seven’s hands pause, somewhere around Raffi’s forearms. She leans in close to Raffi’s ear, her lips just brushing Raffi’s earlobe.
“And I haven’t even gotten to my favorite parts,” says Seven.
Raffi’s learned plenty about patience over the past few months. So she wills her body to keep still.
Except for her mouth. She kisses Seven deeply, wonders just how wet she can make this woman for her, how much desire a single body can hold.
When Seven finishes her thorough examination of all the parts of Raffi that she loves, she’s flushed, dark-eyed.
Raffi takes pity on her, flips her onto her back, spreads her legs, and licks that one side of her clit, the one where if she concentrates Seven comes – not necessarily fast , but very, very hard.
Seven’s already worked up. It’s not long until she’s moaning her release, loudly, fisting her hands in the sheets and bucking against Raffi’s mouth. Raffi’s covered from cheek to chin with silken desire.
Raffi can – and absolutely will – make her come like this, again and again and again, but this first orgasm takes the edge off. It lets Seven think. It offers Raffi temporary respite from the torture of Seven dripping all over Raffi’s own cunt.
Seven covers her eyes with a hand, her mouth open and panting. Sometimes the lights are a little too bright for her when she’s think worked up. Raffi orders the computer to lower them, but Seven doesn’t think to move her hand.
“How do you want me?” asks Seven. “How else can I get my point across?”
For a moment, Raffi’s breathless with it, how open, vulnerable, and available Seven has made herself in her bed. In her life. Even now, with everything else.
Raffi kisses a line up Seven’s slick inner thigh. “Let me think about it,” she whispers, and when she begins to lick Seven’s cunt again, Seven lets out a moan, then a growl.
Her legs fall open even wider, let Raffi in and in and in.
The theme of the evening is closeness and intimacy and vulnerability, celebration of the self. So Raffi picks the strap, with Seven riding her, putting her xB strength to use as Raffi licks and sucks and swirls her mouth around the fingers of Seven’s implant hand.
Seven leans her head back, the look on her face a combination between joy, freedom, and exhilaration, and Raffi alternates between sucking and letting her tongue hang loose. She tilts her hips just a little, meeting each thrust, letting Seven fill her so fully and completely.
The vulnerability would have been nearly excruciating, had the two of them not worked, and worked hard to get to the moment they’re in here and now.
“Stop making me come,” breathes Seven to the ceiling, with a laugh and Raffi grins but can’t help it. She loves having things in her mouth. If the choice is between not pleasuring someone she cares about and pleasuring them, her course of action is clear. “You’re such an overachiever.”
Raffi thinks now isn’t the best time to point out that Seven had designed an entire evening around getting them to this kind of grounding point, with a conversation with an emotional truth that was over before they even turned the heat on in the pan. She just purses her lips, swirls her tongue around Seven’s metal-capped fingertips, and sucks , jerking her hips harder against Seven to prove her point.
Seven’s soaked again, slows her pace just for a moment as another orgasm ripples through her body and she has to steady herself on the shaking bed. Raffi can feel it on her thighs, is vaguely aware of the mess they’re making in the sheets. But she feels every thrust in her spine, in her nervous system, sparking in her veins and lighting her up on the inside.
“But I love this so much,” she says.
Seven pants, her body becoming just a little damp as she shudders, slowly begins the action of her hips again. “Oh Omega, Raff,” she groans. “Me too.”
Seven drags Raffi’s spent body on top of hers when they finish. Normally, they clean each other up after this kind of thing, sometimes even change the sheets before they go to bed. Instead, Raffi feels herself falling asleep on Seven’s chest, feels Seven’s breathing evening.
And she doesn’t mind it in the slightest.
It's a special occasion.
She awakens with a start, sticky and just a little bit stiff. She shifts just a little bit and realizes that she's very much still wet.
But god, does Seven fit so perfectly against her body, in her arms.
“Hey,” says Seven softly, raising her arms to hold Raffi against her chest. “You’re okay. You’re right here.”
Like instinct – it’s almost magnetic – Raffi presses her lips to Seven’s.
Seven’s right, of course.
Here is where they are and here is where they are not alone.