Title: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Summary: A nursery rhyme becomes so much more.

Pairing: C/7. Well, not so much. There are definite references in there, and I think it's completely obvious anyway, but this is not a romance-focused story.

Author's Note: Hold your horses – even horses need to be held sometimes. Okay, I haven't written anything new in quite a while. What can I say...? Lack of inspiration may be a reason, but it's driving me crazy. I have all this stuff I want to write, but I haven't got the words in my brain yet! And asides from that, my writing pad has disappeared, and I write on paper before writing on my laptop. Everything just feels fake at the moment, so I really do hope that this is okay. I have pretty much made up all the stuff about assimilation, so if it's all wrong, that's why. Peace out!

It's not until you've breathed in the putrid aroma of your own flesh burning, that you can even begin to understand what the Borg go through. It's not until you've felt the pain of thousands of millions of nanoprobes circulating around your weak, defenceless body that you can start to imagine the agony. Until you've waited nervously in line, catching fleeting glimpses of this act being performed on other people, people you know, you cannot lay claim to having experienced fear.

I have experienced fear.

I don't remember it, but then, how could I? I was only six. I was a six-year-old little girl whose favourite colour was red. My favourite food was strawberries, and I aspired to become a ballerina. I loved, and was loved by, my parents: Magnus and Erin Hansen. My favourite Auntie was my Aunt Irene. I was well behaved, if a little boisterous. I was an individual; I breathed in and out the very essence of uniqueness.

My ears were pierced, and my favourite earrings were the shape of ballet shoes. I didn't much like the ones shaped like lucky dice; my Uncle Harold purchased those for me during a trip to the carnival when I was four.

I threw up whilst riding on the teacups.

When my parents broke the news to me that we were leaving the home I'd lived in and loved, I was devastated. But, my father had work to do, theories to validate; if my mother could knuckle down and be enthusiastic about it, then so could I. I dutifully packed up my small trunk of belongings, including my tiny jewellery box. The jewellery box opened up to the sweet, lingering melody of 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', an ancient Earth nursery rhyme sung by parents and carers alike in order to coerce children into slumber.

The day that the news really sunk in, that we were leaving, was the last day I spent with my best friend, Rosalina. Like myself, she was an aspiring ballerina, and we'd lain on our beds for hours on end fantasising about the day we'd dominate centre stage. We spent our last day together swinging on the rickety old rope swing in her neighbours' cornfield. We swung until we were dizzy, and then slouched down on the soft, billowing grass, just watching the clouds turn from marshmallow pink to calypso orange. I'd eaten with her family that night.

Chicken and potatoes had never tasted so good.

It was odd, venturing out into open space. My parents, for some strange reason, told me to go to bed; despite the fact that it was only four o' clock PM and I hadn't even eaten. For the first time in my life, I disobeyed them. I stayed up, walking through our tiny ship. The modest walls, weapons array, and source of power were not symmetrical to the namesake Raven. A ship named 'Raven' should have been majestic. It should have boasted sleek, stylish black walls, a weapons system like no other that had ever been in existence before, and a Warp Core that could go up to the maximum.

It was a disappointment, as such, to view my 'bedroom', or in Laymen's terms: Quarters. My parents had tried; the walls were a perfect sugarplum pink, and my bed was comfortable. However, I yearned for my bedroom back at home, with its ruby red walls and soft, plush mattress. My stuffed toy collection, including my favourite: Tinker, a well-worn mouse, had dissipated, perhaps into thin air. It was hard to sleep, that first night.

And every single night after that.

More than anything, I remember the nightmares. Huge, hairless robots would chase me through various corridors; burned into my memory forever is the image of inside my imaginary Borg 'house', with its rusted instruments of design hanging from slick steel walls. I'd wake up at three in the AM, silently screaming, soaked with a cold sweat that would stay with me through the rest of the day, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

All my terrifying nightmares, however, were of no use when it came to my actual assimilation. The Borg Drones, although strikingly akin to the ones that I'd conjured up in my subconscious, were not the monsters I'd been expecting. Their order, their calmness, and their sheer inability to feel emotion fascinated me, despite my ever-growing fear. I hid under a console, cowering furiously in a blatant attempt to avoid detection. For the first time in my entire life, my 'fight or flight' instinct had been put to the test, and I flew to supposed safety like the 'Raven' should have done. My efforts only prolonged my misery, though, because my parent's screams only confirmed my worst fears: that my life was over.

I wasn't assimilated on the spot. Oh, no; I was led calmly, oddly enough, through a Borg cube. I caught one last, fleeting, glimpse at my father, who mouthed 'Annika, run', at me, before he was injected with what I now know was a 'fatal' dose of nanoprobes.

And it was in that moment, that split second, that I promised myself I'd never rely on another.

It would have been an easy enough promise to keep to myself, if things had gone like I'd thought they would. I'd expected to be assimilated within the next ten minutes. I was kept waiting for a little while though, and I now know that it was because it takes times for nanoprobes to affect a person's internal systems. If you go too fast, the person will internally combust; but if the process takes too long, the nanoprobes are treated as a disease by the person's immune system, and their antibodies will eventually figure out a way to shield against the foreign bodies.

Assimilation deals death.

Resistance is futile. Perhaps, but the will to live is strong, and not many people comply when they're equipped with the knowledge that their world, as they know it, is soon to be over

Maturation chambers are designed to age the body and the brain of a newly assimilated child. The length of time spent inside such a chamber is dependant on age, size, physical characteristics, and mental capability. An inside to the 'Collective Consciousness' or 'Hive Mind' is given to the drone. Most, if not all memories of life before assimilation are eradicated, and each drone is given an appropriate designation.

Mine was to be: 'Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One'.

Where chaos and irrationality had once ruled; peace, logic, and understanding survive, not unlike the mantra of the Vulcan's. To a Drone, the capture of an entire species is not seen as genocide, but as an extreme mercy mission, in which only the victorious are granted a new life within the hive. To assist with the task of assimilating others into the Hive is all a Borg Drone yearns to do, was all I yearned to do.

Until that day...

Eighteen years after I was assimilated into the collective, I came across the Starship Voyager. After some conversations that lead to an ill-received treaty of sorts between me, my drones, and the Voyager crew, we began work aboard their ship. After awhile, things became, typically of human relations, frosty, and the crew's Commanding Officer was quite ready to just dispose of me and my drones in the vacuum that is the universe.

Things were eventually restored to an orderly state.

I woke up in their Medical bay. That is where I was told that I had been 'liberated' from the Borg. The leader of the Voyager crew, Captain Kathryn Janeway, told me that I'd had a vast majority of my Borg implants removed, and as such, would regain my individuality. The smug look on her face as she relayed the details of how this had come to be repulsed me. I was stuck, in a bizarre half-Borg half-human existence, and all the emotions that had been purged from my soul during assimilation had returned.

Fear, anger, and confusion; they swirled around my mind, like bumblebees swarm around a beehive as it lays broken on the ground after a curious child hits it with a stick. I begged, pleaded, and groveled to be sent back to my Collective. My Collective, where emotions meant nothing, and order meant everything. How can one regain their individuality after months, years even, as just a part of an ever-growing brain?

How indeed.

For those first few months, I bled an aura of discomfort. Fear, hopelessness, and isolation coursed through me.

Those feelings, the very same ones that I'd felt as I'd heard my parent's screams whilst I hid under a console, bit into my very being like the shock from a laser beam. I could trust no one, everybody was a traitor.

The whole damn universe was out to get me.

As such, social occasions were torturous, and I kept myself to myself. Employment was a safe haven, and I found my solace in Astrometrics. I formed relationships, somewhat begrudgingly. Stormy rivalries, like the one I shared with the ship's Chief Engineer, and hesitant friendships, like the one I formed with the Emergency Medical Hologram, or as the ship called him: The Doctor, 'Doc'.

All the while, thoughts of home remained in my mind.

…

It got better, gradually. My slightly more hostile of relationships thawed, and I went on to form even closer bonds with those that I'd trusted early on. I became a little more knowledgeable about social norms, and people became a little more accustomed to me.

The most difficult day that I faced would be the day I spent learning about my family. Their reckless ways incensed me, and I felt nothing but pitied scorn for the two characters who thought it acceptable to whisk their child away from everything she'd ever known.

I didn't even think of that child as myself until later. In my haste to return to my alcove for some much-needed regeneration, I stumbled slightly. My hands checked my remaining Borg implants before I let them grace the soft shells of my ears.

I felt the microscopic holes in my earlobes where those tiny ballet shoe earrings had once hung, and it all came crashing back to me.

Being tucked back in after running to my parent's room in search of comfort from the terrifying nightmares; family dinners in which my father would praise my mother for her innovative skill, and then look sneakily at me, because we both knew that she'd replicated it whilst reading her latest Holonovel. Imaginary games of Stuck in the Mud with my best friend Tinker.

Normal childhood memories... And they were mine.

As the years went on, I became more and more human. I attended weddings, cooed adoringly at newborn babies, and laughed at memories old with friends.

I fell in love.

I, the former Borg Drone who would never rely on another ever again, fell in love with the very same man whose original intention was to dispose of me after I'd outlived my usefulness to his mission.

We married shortly after Voyager's return to Earth. We had our first child three years later.

Aisla Irene Kotay.

Her nursery is painted in the most perfect sugarplum pink, and her jewellery box has a twirling ballerina in centre stage. I try for her, the way my parents never got the chance to try for me.

Every single night, I hold her and sing those words my mother once sang to me.

'Twinkle, twinkle little star; how I wonder what you are,

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky,

Twinkle, twinkle little star; how I wonder what you are.'