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She knows who she is.
She always has done, on some level. Professing her uncertainty with regard to humanity and its seemingly endless foibles hadn’t been a ruse, precisely; she hadn’t known who she was by their specific measures. She was, admittedly, naïve. She hadn’t known how to behave in a way that would make them happy. A way that would make her captain happy.
And she wanted to make her captain happy; had wanted to make her happy even as she was made to believe that her journey of change and development was something she needed to undertake. Something active, a pursuit of individuality, rather than something to uncover organically as she experienced the world through her own eyes and not the shared experiences of millions of others.
On her more charitable days, she thinks that it’s just because they didn’t know better. There was no blueprint for them to follow, no So You’ve Liberated a Drone from the Collective holoprogram to work through.
Those more charitable days don’t come around that often, though.
There’s a reason her occasional reminisces on times on Voyager so often result in Raffi shaking her head and muttering ‘fucking Janeway’.
She doesn’t share quite the same feelings, finds herself incapable of putting her tangled emotions of the ups and downs of those four years and their aftermath into words, but there’s enough of something in that tangled mess for her to just shrug, rather than correct her.
She doesn’t feel the need to make Janeway happy anymore, but she does, to her mild embarrassment, feel like she still doesn’t want to completely let her down.
But she definitely doesn’t feel like she wants to put in any effort to make her new captain happy.
***
Shaw is a good engineer. He’s even a good captain.
She’s not sure that he’s a good person.
She accepts that her view of these things is framed in a certain way, but every time she hears Commander Hansen it wears away at her a little more.
At first, she didn’t notice it because she was riding on adrenaline (and slight unease) that this was actually happening, the outcome she had hoped for back in those early days. This was what Janeway had wanted for her. It was what she was pretty sure she wanted for herself, even if that hope was coloured by the limitations of her own expectations and experiences of what life in the Alpha Quadrant could possibly hold for her.
And then she didn’t notice it because by then, she was used to it.
It took Sidney La Forge calling her Commander Seven for the first time, quietly and with a nervous smile, for her to feel the sting the rest of the time. Her heart felt the lightest it had since the last message had come in from Raffi to let her know that it was time, that she didn’t know when she’d next be able to emerge from deep cover to get in touch. Her time on the Titan thus far had been one of service excellence and forced emotional detachment. Stopping to think and feel and yearn and miss was unacceptable.
The tentative Commander Seven? made her feel better, and in doing so, it made her feel , period. By that point, letting herself crack wide open on some level seemed inevitable, so she took the comfort in hearing her name spoken by another – even if it meant letting herself feel the pain of hearing the name of a dead child or a fascist leader spoken by everyone else, day in, day out.
Sticks and stones , she thinks to herself.
***
‘Did you have a chance to look at the proposal for the new shuttle, sir?’
She knew she had a shadow catching up with her in the corridor, and stops now that she’s succeeded in doing so. ‘Not yet, Ensign.’
Sidney lets out a sigh. ‘Understood, Commander.’
‘Why didn’t you just take it straight to the captain?’
‘Because you’ll always spot the issues that we’ll miss, and then once he approves it the simulations will actually work the way we hope and the project can go ahead.’
She chuckles and starts walking again, Sidney still at her elbow.
‘And why can’t you just trust that the captain will spot the issues before he lets you go ahead with it?’
‘Because the captain won’t be able to see the details the same way you can, Commander Seven.’
She shakes her head as they round the corner.
‘I’m not as stupid as you think I am, La Forge.’
And walk straight into Shaw.
‘Captain, I– I didn’t.’
‘Sure you didn’t. And nobody on this ship, fancy first officer or otherwise, is to be addressed by a Borg designation. Dismissed.’
Sidney meekly slinks away.
‘Hansen, get your ass to the bridge before I feel compelled to use stronger language than “ass”.’
Seven heads for the bridge.
She knows who she is.