Photographs

(Soji & Hugh)

Soji crouched among the wreckage of her old quarters on the Artefact, staring at a photograph of her and Dahj. A graduation photo, of all things, when they'd never had a graduation; those blue robes and tasseled caps were as fake as the diplomas they carried.

As for Dahj, with her proud smile and one arm tucked around her sister's shoulders, Soji almost wished that she had been a fake as well. You couldn't miss someone who never existed.

Were there more sisters – more copies, Soji corrected bitterly – in the settlement on this planet? What would they be like? Were they more mentally stable than Soji, knowing exactly what they were and where they came from? Would they pity her? Or would they resent her, justifiably, for showing up with a fleet of Warbirds in her wake?

She let the photo flutter to the ground and bowed her head, still on her knees as if she were praying, although she wouldn't know whom to pray to and didn't even believe that anyone would answer. Even in the days she had still believed in someone, it hadn't been God.

A light tap of metal against metal behind her made her leap to her feet and whirl around, seizing the desk lamp as the closest weapon at hand.

"Apologies," said a tenor voice with a slight mechanical edge to it.

An ex-Borg stood in the doorframe, having knocked on the wall with steel-covered knuckles. It took her a few seconds to recognize him in full armor, but those blue-gray eyes and gentle features were unmistakable.

"Hugh?" She put the lamp back on the desk and blushed, remembering that she was talking to her former superior. "I mean, Director - "

"Soji." He crossed the room and held out both hands, organic and prosthetic. Up close, his face looked pale, but his eyes shone. "I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you safe."

"We thought you were dead!" She squeezed his hands, blinking back a hot rush of tears. "When the Romulans attacked the Cube - "

"We XB's are not easy to kill." There was a new, grim note in his voice she understood perfectly. "Seven of Nine linked us in a temporary micro-Collective in order to save as many of us as she could. A radical method … " He looked down uncomfortably at his armored body, "But it worked."

Soji could feel a million questions rising up - the doctor in her was fascinated – but first things first.

"Does Picard know? And the others?"

"Yes," he rasped. "I gave him rather a shock, looking like this, but it couldn't be helped."

"It shouldn't matter what you look like!" Soji was indignant on Hugh's behalf, even though she had been startled by his appearance earlier as well (and Picard had his own reasons for reacting badly to a Borg exoskeleton). "Why does it matter, as long as you're still here?"

"It means a great deal to hear you say that." The warmth of his manner should have been at odds with his mechanical appearance, but it wasn't. "This, you see, is one of the things I have always respected about you: your ability to accept what others fear."

Soji knew he meant it as a compliment, but she couldn't help but feel it as a reproach. Looking around at the mess she had made of her room – torn-up photographs, ripped-up diary pages, her blue plush toy lying with its arms sprawled like a corpse – she felt, bitterly, that Hugh was wrong. She wasn't that accepting of a person; how could she be, when she could barely accept herself? How could he claim to know anything about her, when she barely knew herself?

The paranoia she had been battling ever since she had left this cube reared its ugly head. "Did you know I'm an android? Is that why you hired me?"

"No."

"What about Narek? Did you know he was a spy?"

"If I had turned away every potential spy my Romulan sponsors sent me, I would never have survived this long. I tried to stop him, but I failed. For that, I am sorry."

Her suspicion eased a little, and she felt guilty. The damage done to him and his Artefact spoke volumes; there was no way he could be in league with the Zhat Vash.

"But if you had known," she persisted, hardly knowing what answers she wanted or why she wanted them so badly, "If you'd known what I really was … what would you have done?"

"I suspected there was more to you than meets the eye, but nothing like this," said Hugh. "Still, it would not have made a difference to me. You were, and still are, one of the finest doctors it has ever been my privilege to work with. When this crisis is over, should you choose to accept it, there will always be a place for you on the Artefact."

She strained her superhuman senses to see if he was lying, but not even the faintest change in his body language signaled anything but the truth. The implants regulating his vital signs hummed steadily, his voice did not waver, and he met her eyes head-on.

It was this, of all things, that made the tears she had been holding back finally flow.

Ever since learning who she was, it felt as if her life had been defined by people trying to make her fit their definitions of who she was. Hugh didn't care about that. With an ex-Borg's practicality, he was judging her by the only thing that mattered to him: the work they had done together and the skills he could use for his cause.

After being Narek's victim, Data's daughter, Maddox's masterpiece and Picard's redemption, it was a relief beyond words to be simply someone's colleague.

"Thank you." She scooped her plush toy off the floor, turned her back on Hugh in order to replace it on its shelf, and buried her face briefly in its soft blue fur. "That's … thank you, Director. I'll … um … I'll get back to you on that."

"I understand, of course, if you choose to stay with your people." Rustling sounds and the creaking of stiff armor told her he was gathering up the papers from her floor. "Or with your crew."

"If any of us survive this," she muttered, mostly to herself.

"If, indeed."

He came up beside her, a polite distance away, to place a stack of photographs on the desk. He handled them with as much care as if the life they depicted had been real.

"Sorry about the mess, by the way." She stood her overturned chair back upright, picked up her carbon-dating device and put it away in a drawer. "Unprofessional, I know."

"This is the least of my worries, I assure you."

But there was something indescribably soothing about restoring order, even in such a small way. She could tell that Hugh thought the same by the precise way he swept together illegible shreds of paper to put them in the recycler. Was it because they were both part machine, or because they were scientists? Either way, it was something they had in common.

She found a picture of her twenty-third birthday party (her third, she corrected) in the Artefact's cantina: a replicated chocolate cake on the table, a pink cone-shaped paper hat on her head, a giddy smile on her face, and her teammates clustering around her. Narek had been the photographer (her stomach lurched to remember why she had been smiling at him like that), but Na'ashala was there and so was Hugh, wearing his gray silk suit instead of armor, his brown hair neat and healthy.

Na'ashala must have been killed, Soji realized. If not by the Romulans, then in the crash of the cube. The XB's had only survived because of their implants and Seven's link holding them together; a flesh-and-blood body wouldn't have stood a chance. Soji grieved for the good-natured Trill woman who had always teased her about Narek, and felt sick all over again at the cruelty that would cause so much senseless death.

But whatever else this picture might be, it was real - as real as the friendship of the man who had helped her find it. In a world of illusions, that was no small thing.

She folded it up and tucked it into her pocket. Wherever she might go, she could at least take it with her.