Word: Duende - Ship of your choice ;)
WHOOPS I accidentally wrote 1600 words, so here: some gentle space wives (kathryn janeway/seven of nine) with most of it below the cut. hand-wavingly set toward the end of season six.
Seven spent a lot of time observing, on Voyager.
Her primary subject of study was the behavior of her crewmates, both on-duty and off, trying to ascertain what little logic could be derived from their actions. The Doctor had insisted that camaraderie was an integral part of their efficiency, that even morale—a distastefully vague notion, to say the least—could be measured.
So, Seven watched, quietly. Without PADDs to catalogue her findings, since keeping data in such a fashion was apparently unacceptable. (B’Elanna, despite hours of observation, remained frustratingly inscrutable. Seven didn’t know how a woman who operated within such technical parameters could be so wildly erratic, but ultimately she filed the anomaly away under the subheading ‘emotive Klingon irrationality’ and let it go, for now.)
She watched the bridge crew operate; a hum of surprising efficiency at red alert, a distractible mess of chatter and laughter in calm space or hung in orbit while away teams roved the surface of the nearest planet. She watched Neelix process shift after shift of hungry officers; the smile between his whiskered cheeks often infectious to anyone who entered the mess hall doors, the room itself a hub of activity, ebbing and flowing throughout the day. She even watched the Doctor and Tom triage under pressure, trading off tricorders and hyposprays from patient to patient while an embattled Voyager rocked under Malon attack.
Seven passively observed for a few weeks, without drawing conclusions or ruminating on the collected information in her eidetic memory. A small part of her had had enough of analysis after her cortical processor modification had gone awry, but a larger part of her was content to gather a volume of material to analyze. The larger sample size and her accumulation of daily experience aboard provided new context every day. Further than that, she had been reading from the Federation archives, on the suggestion of a few shipmates, to broaden her horizons.
(“But there is no horizon in space when traveling at lightspeed, Ensign.” Harry sighed. “It’s just an idiom, Seven. But there’s a lot of Earth’s history to cover. And you’re fluent in like, a hundred languages, so don’t limit yourself.”)
So, in fairness, she certainly wasn’t expecting to wake mid-regeneration cycle with the epiphany that there was one singular common denominator amongst all her datasets: Captain Janeway.
But of course once she did, she saw it everywhere.
Janeway, leaned up against Tuvok’s console on the bridge, her arms crossed as she debated upgrades to the torpedo array with her chief of security. And though the line of his mouth did not change, his brows lifted, impressed at her suggestions, his hands flying over the console to obey.
Janeway on a couch in the mess hall, flanked by Tom and Harry as she battled Neelix in an esoteric game of some kind that had roused all of the post-alpha shift crew into a frenzy. Seven couldn’t quite discern the finer points of play, but Chakotay and B’Elanna’s emphatic yelling impressed upon her the name—‘flip cup’—while they tried to shout the Talaxian to victory. The roar from every ensign when the captain emerged victorious, the beaming smile Janeway flashed at everyone in the room—Seven included, though she sat at a table to herself with a nutritional supplement.
Janeway, brimming with barely concealed excitement when called on for diplomacy; first contact on the viewscreen giving way to Voyager obtaining passage through alien space, to an extension of supplies and hospitality, to an escort past dangerous, hidden astral phenomena on the strength of her careful, measured words, warmed through with a promise of peace, and truth, and honesty.
Janeway showing up in Astrometrics at 0300 hours, coffee in hand, command jacket shrugged on but left unzipped. Janeway stumbling to a stop with a look of surprise to find Seven at her station, then a sheepish smile, an explanation of sleepless nights and an itching curiosity about the black hole Seven had reported in her most recent long range scans murmured over the rim of her favorite cup.
Janeway, working silently at the rear monitors, doing nothing more than simply existing in the lab and somehow drawing Seven’s attention away from her tasks. Seven spared one glance after another at the scientist in deep concentration, whose presence filled the room with a gravity Seven did not realize she had oriented herself around until she found she had unconsciously switched stations so her hands could shift over the console while watching the captain work.
(A warmth she did not expect bloomed in her abdomen, then, and it lingered long after Janeway left.)
Janeway in full 19th century regalia, with half the town’s holograms trailing behind her as she danced across Fair Haven’s cobblestone streets. Seven heard the Doctor mutter something about “a certified pied piper” before she found her elbow hooked by the captain’s arm, swept into the impromptu jig, left to match her movements to the Janeway’s and keep time with the music. Seven was breathless, tossed from Janeway to Tom to hologram and back again, guided by rhythm she did not know she possessed. Hands lit on her hip, her waist, grasped her hand and spun her around until the music ended and she found herself in the captain’s grasp once more, a laugh bubbling on Janeway’s lips.
(“I had no idea you could keep up with a ceili, Seven!” Seven blinked, suddenly feeling as if a conclusion from her data was within reach, but the words remained elusive, perhaps pushed away by the overwhelming sensations of the captain’s hands: one currently holding hers, and the other a gentle weight on the small of her back, laid over the material of the dark blue, era-accurate dress Tom had designed for her. “Neither did I.” At that, Janeway’s laughter spilled out, and Seven merely tried to commit every note of the melodic sound to memory.)
Seven found herself reflecting on these recent memories as she sat in the captain’s quarters, Janeway standing at her replicator, tinkering while she extolled the benefits of ‘the arts’ for the forty-sixth time since Seven had joined the crew.
She had not intended to engage in philosophical discussion this evening, but Janeway had declared their duty-shifts complete after a taxing day in Engineering with B’Elanna, who had needed assistance with long-overdue warp core maintenance. When Seven had called the turbolift to take her to deck four, the captain had invited her for dinner, which they had concluded an hour ago. When Seven had stood from the table to return to Cargo Bay 2, Janeway asked about Seven’s recreational reading of late, so she took a seat in the living room area instead.
By the time they had begun their meal, that curious sensation of warmth had returned, and brought with it the sensation that Seven was on the precipice of something important. So she decided to stay, curious, observing, and intent.
“Poetry has gotten me through a lot of this trip, you know,” Janeway finally said, turning around with a triumphant smile and two cups of steaming liquid in her hands. She extended one toward Seven as she approached. “For you. Vulcan spice tea, Tuvok’s blend.”
As Seven accepted the beverage, Janeway sank onto the couch next to her, cradling what was undoubtedly a cup of coffee to her gray-shirted chest, uniform jacket hung on the back of her recliner across the room.
“I’m partial to English language poets, but there have been hundreds in the Federation’s history worth reading. Klingon love poetry is robust, to say the least. But I find I gravitate to Earth poets, and those of centuries gone by. Something about knowing that they wrote their words before a world among the stars grounds me, even when the subject matter is as universal as love. No one is immune to penning words about the first pangs of attraction, not even Vulcans.”
Something stirred in Seven’s encyclopedic knowledge as she sipped at the warm, soothing tea in her hand. Her eyes drifted to the archaic, hard-bound books stacked on Janeway’s—“Kathryn,” the captain had insisted, “it’s Kathryn when we’re off duty, Seven. Please.”—Kathryn’s table, and spied a name that halted her cup halfway to her lips. Federico Garcia Lorca.
Playwright. The House of Bernarda Alba. Poet. Ditty Of First Desire. Lecturer—oh! Finally, Seven thought. The answer.
She looked up from her unblinking stare into the amber liquid of her cup to find Kathryn’s eyes fixed on her, that characteristic half smile curling up one corner of her mouth.
“You seemed to be thinking very hard about something, just now, but I don’t think it was about Vulcan poetry.” The smile grew bigger and Janeway’s blue eyes seemed to glitter. (The warmth in Seven’s stomach swooped, her mouth going dry.) “Will you tell me what it was?”
“Duende,” Seven said, setting down her cup.
Kathryn’s brows twitched into a furrow above that lingering smile, the way they always did when her curiosity was piqued. “What?”
“You are, by my observation, the singularly most charismatic being to ever exist in the Delta Quadrant, Kathryn.”
Her eyebrows shot upward, and she reflexively put down her mug before she gestured at herself with an incredulous hand. “Me?”
See, Seven spent a lot of time observing, on Voyager.
So she knew when she leaned forward to press her lips to Kathryn’s that the kiss would not be unwelcome, that in fact Kathryn would melt into the embrace with a low, muffled noise of happiness, and kiss her back. Because the last six months worth of observational data proved, unequivocally, that not only could Kathryn Janeway charm any being she wanted, but that there was only one being she wanted most to succeed on.
“Yes,” Seven said, her voice laced through with the casual arrogance of unshakeable confidence she felt when she knew, unerringly, that she was correct. “You.”
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