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There was something about the skyline, the feel of the air against her skin that felt familiar, in a deep-seated sort of way.
But Raffi had always found the Los Angeles of her time to be a little more rough and ready than San Francisco – as rough and ready as the Federation would let a major city on Earth become.
Off-Earth, well.
There must have been some ancient motes that lingered in hidden places, brought to the surface to keep the thin film of something that always felt like it clung to everything. It was comforting, in some ways, to feel its borderline tangible atmosphere when transporting Earthside from the clinical corridors of her latest starship posting.
If she had stopped to let herself breathe and feel anything other than adrenaline and anguish, Raffi might have let herself feel slightly centred by the sensation of familiarity in a place so devoid of the familiar in every other way. She might let herself steal a moment to look northwards, squint to look for familiar rock formations fifty or so kilometres away from where she’s standing.
Four hundred years of societal breakdown and rebuild is nothing to geology.
Instead she focuses on her tricorder, on the task at hand. On Seven beside her, an unusually distracted but still comforting presence. On an LA that could become her own, could become an unrecognisable fascist hellhole, spreading out in front of her.
‘Maybe we should take a picture,’ Seven says idly, leaning on the railing as she gazes not at the view but at her hands. ‘Remember this moment.’
Raffi will not let herself be drawn from her task. ‘All the peachy goings on of humanity in 2024 as it tees up its homicidal, xenophobic future? That moment?’
Seven flexes her fingers, shifting her grip slightly. ‘Or the moment that we change things for the better. And maybe we’re changed for the better for it?’ The optimism in her voice sounds foreign, even to her. But not wrong.
She pulls her hands back and buries them in her jacket pockets when Raffi snorts. Derisively would be putting it mildly. Seven rubs her left thumb up and down the back of her index finger and feels warmth, a smooth, unmarred stretch of skin.
Raffi doesn’t notice her shift from earnestly thoughtful to taciturn.
***
Later, leaning into each other on the couch in her trailer, fifty kilometres north of where Markridge Industrial Tower had stood four hundred years earlier, Raffi traces the same path, where tritanium meets flesh, and places gentle, careful kisses on each knuckle.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t get you your cellular photograph,’ she murmurs, tone equal parts teasing and quietly contrite. ‘Of your… lighter load days.’
Seven shrugs. ‘It wasn’t the most pressing thing. And we would have had no way to bring it back with us to the present.’
‘Still.’
‘It was… odd.’
‘Good odd, though?’
Seven’s sigh is ragged, conflicted. ‘I felt lighter. In every way. And then I felt guilty for allowing myself to do anything as… irrelevant as focus on my altered state.’
‘It wasn’t irrelevant, Seven. Tell me.’
She makes a face. ‘Okay. Maybe not irrelevant. The thing that I still don’t understand it that I didn’t register that things were – that I was different – until I noticed my visible implants were gone. But my body felt different to inhabit. My senses were different. My thinking, processing, memory… all purely organic , for the first time since I was six.’
She pauses, draws a breath. ‘Even the way I see. This eye isn’t just artificial, the way that somebody who loses one in an accident would have. It’s still imbued with Borg tech. I see differently, take in the world completely differently through my left eye. The fact that the whole world looked different, that it lacked data streams that I take in the same way your eyes register the shade of blue that the sky is today… none of that occurred to me until after the first adrenaline spike wore off.
‘It doesn’t make sense to me, but…’ She gestures vaguely. ‘There was a lot to process, I guess. And my brain was trying to do it the old-fasioned way for the first time in fifty years. It didn’t think to do a meta-analysis of inside when there was so much weird going on outside.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘And when I let myself dwell on it and unpack it, even a little, it made me painfully aware of everything else that was different. Movement – balance, even. Not the greatest thing to be relearning on the fly in that particular future.’
Raffi lets Seven pause again, but takes the opportunity to reposition them so she is leaning against the arm of the couch, legs akimbo, and Seven is leaning back into her torso nestled between them. Raffi’s arms very pointedly wrap themselves in around Seven’s middle in a way that gently skims her abdominal implants.
‘And then the whole strangers thing, one we were in the 21st century. Nobody seeing my face and just seeing xB, seeing Borg , like they do in every quadrant in our time. No perceived notoriety. Just an ordinary woman.’
‘Seven, we’ve been through this. Never, ever ordinary.’ Seven starts to interject, and Raffi squeezes her mid-section to quiet her and gets a squeak of protest. ‘But I do see what you mean. In this instance.’
‘Yeah. So that part. That was nice. I’ll miss that part. Being able to blend in, be trusted. Exist unchallenged.’
‘Mmm.’
‘But Raff, I know that it’s selfish.’
‘What do you mean, honey?’ Raffi’s fingers play with the edge of Seven’s shirt, catch on a loose thread.
‘It was 2024 and I got to ride the high of the way society treated me because I’m an attractive blonde white woman.’
‘Modest too.’
Seven rolls her eyes, organic and artificial both. ‘Okay, you live on a starship for four years wearing a skintight biosuit with my body, or yours, for that matter, and then come back to me on objectivity around attractiveness.’
‘Point taken, circling back to that at another time. Continue.’
‘ Anyway , I realise that especially in that era, my experience of how the world treated me is really, really different to how it treated you – or would have, if we’d been there long enough to interact with that world and its inhabitants more.’
‘Are you calling me unattractive?’
‘ Raffi .’
‘Okay, okay, no more teasing. It had crossed my mind too,’ Raffi admits. ‘I wasn’t particularly excited to experience what life would be like as a person of colour in such an enlighted era. But it’s not selfish to miss having a little privilege, Seven.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Plus you basically immediately outed yourself to that security guard, so you did maintain equilibrium pretty well.’
Seven laughs at that. ‘That’s true.’
‘That helped, you know?’
‘My forgetting about archaic views on sexuality when cobbling together a reasonable lie?’
‘Being called your girlfriend – fiancée, even. That was… comforting.’
Raffi feels like she’s said too much. But Seven lets herself sink further into her embrace, nestles her head under her chin. ‘It was comforting to me too. We were all turned around, but walking backwards into the future was tolerable since it was with you.’
‘Maybe we should recreate the tower on the holodeck some day. Capture an image that way and recreate the moment. I wonder if I can find a replicator pattern for a Polaroid camera for real 21st century authenticity.’
‘If you like,’ Seven murmurs. ‘Implants being back means the eidectic memory’s back too. I get to hold onto the moment forever.’
‘Seems only fair that I get the opportunity to hold onto it too, then.’
Seven nods.