Chapter 3: Mutual addiction
Tom tried to function. He sat at the helm, his hands moving over the console with muscle memory alone, while the rest of him felt hollowed out and rewired. The link was a live wire in his mind, a constant, low-grade hum of her. Every other sensation was muted. The conversation on the bridge sounded like it was happening through water. B’Elanna’s customary morning comm message, playful and warm, had landed in his ear like a foreign language.
Guilt was a weight he could no longer locate. He remembered its shape, its texture, the way it had choked him after leaving the alcove. Now there was just… static. An empty channel where his conscience had been. In its place was a sharp, insistent pull, a gravitational tug straight towards Cargo Bay Two.
He didn’t choose to go. His body carried him there during his break, his feet moving silently through the ship's corridors as if pulled by a tractor beam. The door to her private alcove hissed open before he could enter his code.
She was waiting, as before. But different. Her posture was rigid, her jaw tight. An urgency vibrated from her, a tension that had nothing to do with logic. Her fingers tapped a staccato rhythm against her thigh. Her eyes, when they met his, weren’t coolly analytical. They were hungry.
“The feedback loop has not degraded,” she stated. “It has intensified. My attempts to compartmentalize the experiential data from our encounter have failed. The memories replay with 98.6% sensory fidelity at irregular intervals, disrupting my cognitive functions.” She took a step forward. “I require another data stream. To overwrite the cascading repetitions.”
Tom stood in the doorway, caught. “Seven, this has to stop. What we did… I can’t even…”
“You are experiencing residual emotional conflict. Guilt. Shame. It is an inefficient use of neural capacity.” Her voice was brittle, a veneer over something desperate. She lifted her hand, her Borg-enhanced fingers hovering near his temple. “The link permits more than sensory exchange. It allows for targeted synaptic dampening. I can deactivate the neurological pathways associated with those superfluous emotions.”
“What? No. You can’t just ‘deactivate’ guilt.”
“I can.” Her gaze was unwavering. “The parameters are clear. Your guilt impedes the study. It introduces a variable that corrupts the data. To continue, it must be removed. Do you consent?”
The word ‘no’ formed in his throat. But the humming in his skull grew louder, and with it came a flood of sense-memory—the shocking heat of her, the crushing grip of her legs, the cascade of doubled pleasure. His cock, already half-hard from her proximity, throbbed painfully. The guilt was a dim, theoretical concept, a ghost. The need was a concrete, physical fist.
“Just… make it stop,” he heard himself whisper, and it wasn’t clear if he meant the guilt or the relentless, hungry pull.
“Comply.”
Her finger touched his temple. Not a caress. An insertion. A microfilament, finer than a hair, extruded from her fingertip and pierced his skin with a bee-sting prick. It wasn’t pain. It was a cold, precise invasion.
His mind went white.
It wasn’t deletion. It was redirection. He saw B’Elanna’s face—her smile, her fierce eyes, the curve of her lips when she laughed—and the associated feelings of love, warmth, devotion… they simply slid off, like water from a polarized hull. They didn’t disappear; they were rerouted. The emotional signature was disconnected, filed away in a dark, silent corner of his psyche. The love remained, but it was an artifact. A museum piece. It had no weight, no power.
When the white receded, he blinked. He looked at Seven. A profound, terrifying calm settled over him. The conflict was gone. The hollow space was filled with a single, crystalline certainty.
“Your guilt is irrelevant,” Seven said softly, retracting the filament. A tiny bead of blood welled on his temple. “Your marriage is a social framework. It is a facade for biological imperatives you no longer need to obscure.” Her hand slid down his chest, over his stomach, to cup him through his uniform. “Your desire is only for me now. It is efficient.”
He felt the truth of it in his bones. B’Elanna was a pleasant memory. Seven was the present. The future. The only source of the sensation that mattered.
“Yes,” he said, his voice unfamiliar in its flat certainty.
He didn’t wait for her commands. He pushed her back towards the alcove wall, his mouth finding hers. This kiss was different. There was no anger, no struggle for control. It was possessive, devout. He worshipped the firm line of her lips, traced the metal of her implant with his tongue. His hands went to the fastening of her biosuit, and this time it parted for him like a sacrament.
She pushed his uniform jacket off his shoulders, her own movements losing their clinical precision, becoming frantic. They sank to the deck, onto the cool, unforgiving floor. The panels above shifted from blue to a hot, urgent amber.
“I require a variance in data collection,” she gasped as he broke the kiss to bite a trail down her neck. “The previous interaction centered on coital penetration. I must catalog the nuances of other stimulatory practices.”
“Tell me,” he murmured against her skin, his hands on her breasts, his thumbs circling her nipples until they were hard peaks.
“Oral-genital contact. Reciprocal. Simultaneous.”
A dark, thrilling wave of devotion washed through him. To serve her study, to give her what she needed—it was his only purpose. He moved down her body, his fingers hooking under the waist of her suit and pulling it down her legs. She was bare beneath. He spread her thighs, the sight of her making his mouth water. She was flushed, slick, open. The scent of her—metallic ozone undercut by the deep, musk of her arousal—was the only perfume that mattered.
He didn’t tease. He buried his face between her legs, his tongue finding her clit in one long, flat stroke.
Seven cried out, a sharp, truncated sound. Her hands flew to his hair, not pushing him away, but gripping, holding him exactly in place. The link erupted. He tasted her—clean, sharp, complex—and through the loop, he felt the staggering, focused intensity of that touch on his own phantom anatomy. It was a feedback spiral of wet, electric sensation.
He fucked her with his tongue, driving it inside her before circling back to suck harshly on her clit. She bucked against his mouth, her hips pistoning. Her logical phrases dissolved into a stream of filthy, broken binaries.
“Yes—that frequency—maintain—oh—the stimulation is—it is exceeding—oh, fuck—"
Her curse, raw and unfiltered, drove him wild. He redoubled his efforts, his tongue a relentless instrument of devotion. But she had her own agenda. She pushed at his shoulder, her Borg strength insistent.
“My turn,” she panted. “Reciprocity. Now.”
He rolled onto his back, his cock standing rigid against his stomach, pre-come beading at the tip. Seven moved over him with a fluid, predatory grace. She didn’t hesitate. She took the length of him into her mouth in one smooth, deep motion.
Tom shouted, his head slamming back against the deck. The heat, the wet suction, the scrape of her teeth—it was obliterating. And through the link, he felt it from her side: the heavy weight of him on her tongue, the alien taste of salt and skin, the gag reflex she manually suppressed, the fascinating, overwhelming fullness. The double sensation was a paradox—being consumed and consuming at once.
He returned his mouth to her, his tongue finding her clit again as she bobbed her head on his cock. The 69 position locked them into a perfect, closed circuit of pleasure. There was no thought, only data exchange. The wet, sloppy sounds of their mutual fucking filled the alcove. He drank her down as she came, her thighs clamping around his ears, her channel pulsing against his tongue. Her climax triggered his own, and he erupted into her mouth with a guttural roar, his hips jerking off the floor.
She took it all. Every pulse. Every shudder. She swallowed, her throat working around him, and the sensation of her swallowing while he was feeling his own orgasm from her perspective was a madness that shattered him.
They lay tangled on the floor, breathless, dripping. The link hummed, not with aftershocks, but with a new, profound synchronization. Tom pressed a kiss to her inner thigh, a gesture of pure submission.
Seven looked down at him, her lips swollen, her face flushed with an emotion that could almost be called triumph. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“The data is unprecedented,” she said, her voice ragged but already sorting, cataloging. “The emotional recalibration is a success. The bond is now primary. All other attachments are tertiary.”
Tom nodded, resting his cheek against her leg. He felt no loss. Only completion. B’Elanna was a echo. Seven was the voice. His love for his wife hadn't vanished; it had been transferred, purified, and now belonged entirely to the woman whose taste was still on his lips. It was, as she said, efficient. It was right.
He was hers. Utterly. And the hum in his mind was the sound of his own devotion, mirrored back at him forever.