Chapter 6: Grief Counseling
The silence in Tom’s quarters was a physical presence. It had weight, texture—a thick, smothering wool that absorbed the ship’s usual ambient sounds. He stood in the center of the living area, still in his uniform, dismissed from duty with a brittle pat on the shoulder from Chakotay. “Take all the time you need, Tom.” The words were ash.
He had gone to Sickbay. Not to grieve, but to confirm. The Doctor, uncharacteristically somber, had spoken of plasma concussions, of molecular dissipation, of the absolute zero of a contained warp-core breach. The terms were clean. Sterile. They described the unmaking of a woman, of a marriage, of a future, with the bland efficiency of a cargo manifest. Tom had nodded, asked no questions, and left.
Now, here. Their quarters. Her scent was still in the air—that faint, sharp Klingon spice from the soap she used, layered over the ozone of her engineering tools. A padd with a half-finished coil design sat on the table. A mug, the dregs of raktajino stained at the bottom.
He did not cry. He felt scooped out, hollowed by a precision instrument. The world had gone flat, like a view-screen with the depth perception turned off. He sat on the edge of their bed, the mattress firm where she slept, and stared at the blank wall. The hum in his mind, the one that had started in the alcove and crescendoed on the bridge, was now a constant, low-frequency tone. It wasn't a sound. It was a foundation. The only solid thing left.
The door chimed.
He didn’t answer. It chimed again. Then, the soft hiss of an override. The door slid open.
Seven of Nine stood in the threshold, backlit by the corridor’s warmer light. She was out of her biosuit, wearing a simple grey crew-neck tunic and pants. Her posture was erect, her hands clasped behind her back. She surveyed the room, then him, with the same focus she gave a damaged sensor array.
“Lieutenant Paris. Your presence was required elsewhere. You did not respond.”
“Required where?” His voice was rougher than he expected.
“My alcove. Your pattern is integrated with my regeneration cycle. An absence creates dissonance.” She stepped inside, the door shutting behind her. The room seemed to shrink, the air to cool. She moved to the center of the space, her eyes missing nothing—the padd, the mug, the utter stillness of him. “The Captain has declared a period of mourning. It is inefficient. The crew’s emotional expenditure will not restore the lost unit.”
Tom looked up at her. The pale gold of her skin, the metallic glint of her implant along her jaw. The hum in his head vibrated in sympathy with her presence. “She wasn’t a unit.”
“She is gone. The variable is removed.” Seven took another step closer. “You are here. I am here. The integration continues.”
A cold, sharp clarity cut through the numbness. “Is that what this is? Integration?”
“It is a logical progression. Your marital bond is terminated. Your previous emotional investment is now void. The capacity for attachment remains. I am the remaining suitable focus.” She stated it as one would state the solution to an equation. “Do you love me, Lieutenant Paris?”
The question hung in the perfumed, ghost-haunted air. It was obscene. It was the only question left in the universe.
Tom stood up. The distance between them was three paces. He crossed it in two. He could smell her now—not perfume, but the clean, sterile scent of isotopic gel and something underneath, fiercely, biologically alive. “Yes.”
“More than you loved your wife?”
He didn’t hesitate. The hum was a roar, blotting out memory, blotting out guilt. “Yes.”
“Then prove it.” Her voice was a challenge, cool and absolute.
Her hands came up, not to embrace, but to grasp. One hand fisted in the front of his uniform tunic, the other went to his belt. Her movements were efficient, purposeful. No tenderness, no exploration. She popped the seal of his tunic with a sharp tug and pushed it back off his shoulders. Her fingers found the clasp of his trousers, released it, and shoved both fabric and underwear down over his hips in one brutal motion.
He was exposed, hard already—a response that felt divorced from him, a biological trigger pulled by the wiring in his brain. She looked down, assessing.
“Adequate,” she murmured, as if checking a specification.
She pushed him backward. He stumbled, his shins hitting the edge of the bed, and sat down hard. She didn’t join him. Instead, she stripped her own clothes with the same ruthless economy, revealing the stark, perfect lines of her body, the pale swell of her breasts, the dark delta between her legs. The Borg implant on her hand gleamed.
She climbed onto the bed, kneeling over him, one knee on either side of his hips. Her cunt was level with his eyes, and he could see the glistening evidence of her own arousal, a slick, pink fold. She reached down, took his cock in her Borg-enhanced hand. The metal was cool, the grip perfectly, unyieldingly firm. She positioned him, the head of his cock nudging against her entrance.
She looked into his eyes, her own blue and fathomless. “You will be mine. Completely.”
Then she sank down.
There was no gentle acceptance. It was a descent, a claiming. Her body was tight, a silken vice that gripped him with shocking, immediate pressure. She took him all, in one smooth, relentless motion, until her ass met his thighs. A low, guttural sound escaped him—not a moan of pleasure, but a gasp of sheer, overwhelming sensation.
She began to move. Not with rhythm, but with analysis. She rode him with a piston-like precision, lifting and dropping, testing angles, gauging depth. Her inner muscles clenched around him in unpredictable, gripping waves. The wet, filthy sound of their joining filled the silent room. Each slap of flesh was an accusation, a obliteration.
“Fuck,” he grunted, his hands coming up to grab her hips. Her skin was hot, smooth. He tried to guide her, to find a rhythm, but she was in control. Her Borg hand came up and wrapped around his throat, not squeezing, just resting there, a cool, possessive collar.
“You mourn a friend,” she stated, her voice barely hitching, though her breasts bounced with the force of her movements. “But this is your reality. This heat. This friction. My body. Say it.”
“You’re my reality,” he choked out.
“More.”
“You’re everything.” The words were torn from him. With each plunge, the ghost of B’Elanna in the room seemed to thin, to fade, replaced by this consuming, physical truth. Seven’s scent—ozone and woman—overwrote the memory of perfume. The hum in his skull synchronized with the pounding of his heart.
Her pace increased, becoming punishing, brutal. Her perfect composure began to fracture. A flush spread across her chest. Her breath came in sharp, controlled exhales through her nose. Her inner walls began to flutter and spasm, a frantic, clinging rhythm.
“You will come for me, Lieutenant,” she commanded, her voice tight. “You will mark me as yours. As I mark you.”
It was too much. The coil in his gut, wound tight by grief and shock and this ruthless fucking, snapped. Pleasure detonated, a white-out blast that erased thought, erased past, erased self. He came with a raw, shouting groan, bucking up into her, spilling deep inside her in pulsing, endless jets. It felt less like release and more like a transfer of essence, a violent rewriting.
She continued to ride him, milking him through the shattering waves, until he was spent, shuddering. Only then did she allow her own climax. It was a silent, profound convulsion. Her head tilted back, her neck tendons standing in stark relief. Her body clamped down on him, a final, possessive squeeze. A single, sharp sigh escaped her lips.
She held there, impaled, for a long moment. Then, slowly, she lifted herself off him. He was soft, wet with both of them. She looked down at the mess, at his limp form on the bed that had once been a marriage bed.
She leaned over, placing her hands on either side of his head, her face close to his. Her breath was warm on his mouth.
“The integration is complete,” she whispered, the words a verdict. “You are mine. Forever.”
In her eyes, he saw no love, no compassion. He saw possession, cold and absolute and total. And in the void where his heart had been, in the silence finally louder than the hum, he knew she was right. He was home.