Her face is bruised, a vibrant dark diagonal swath across the zygomaticomaxillary suture. I am caught by the beauty of it, by the vivid burning purpleness of it, by the contrast to her fair complexion. I can feel the heat of it before my fingers make contact. The fierce heat of her fierce blood. I am careful, but perhaps even this light touch hurts. She does not flinch; she allows it. But perhaps it hurts her.

One of them struck her. I see it play out now, in more detail than seems possible, as if it happened much more slowly than it did. The brutal back of his hand slamming into her fragile features, which could be so easily destroyed, enough force to knock her head around, enough force to send her staggering back a step. Only a step. The delicate skin (it feels soft and thin) just beneath her eye compressed between his hand and her bone. I can see (it is impossible that I can see) the fine network of capillaries (amazingfeatofengineering) bursting under the blow, sprays of blood erupting, rising to the surface, red purple. Red purple under the skin, her human blood. Her pure human blood, flush with oxygen. Her powerful red blood. Called forth by his violence, rising like her anger, fast and furious, trapped and contained.

And she stands—she stumbles back a step, and she stands.

She stands, right hand thrust behind her, hip level, palm down, fingers spread. It is a small thing. The gesture. The hand. No one notices. No one except me and the officers arrayed behind her, the men and women she has stepped in front of. They see it, too, and they stop, movement arrested before fully existent so that it seems as if they tense and swell and surge against an invisible barrier pressed tightly to their very skin. And I too stop. Because she stands, because she still stands.

She takes it, this violence, and absorbs it, and holds us back. She stares at the man who has hit her.

He is taller than she, taller than I, and her throat is bared defiantly as she tilts her head back to stare him in the eye. He laughs, mocking her, and unholsters his weapon, turns it in his hand. He is going to strike her with the disruptor. His arm is rising and his companions are shifting, ready to go for the strongest of the men at her back. They don't believe her people will be still if she is abused again.

Seconds have elapsed and still her hand calls us to heel. Across the room, I am still frozen by it. Without conscious intent, my mind calculates and I know how long it will take me to reach him, to reach any of them, and I know that it will not be soon enough. The other men have their disruptors positioned to fire, not bludgeon, and they will take any of us down long before we can get to any of them.

He's bringing his arm down, angling the stock of his weapon at her head, and then her arm comes up and blocks it and she's stepping into him, twisting the disruptor, pulling him off balance, and her right hand is rising (we are released), the palm connecting solidly beneath his chin.

I hear the sound his teeth make as they are forced together by the blow. And local security is here, their disruptors whining as they exchange fire with our assailants. Our people have scattered to get out of the way of the disruptor blasts. Someone in gold and black is bringing two fists down onto the back of an alien neck. I don't see who because the scene is a blur. I am running and I see only the tableau of her small body locked against his as they struggle for control of the disruptor. He is big and she is not, but while he started this, she is ready for it and he is not. He saw her happy relaxed crew, unarmed, saw their open smiles and unwary frivolity, and saw easy targets. He saw her small and weak and diplomatic and did not realize. As I did not, as the Borg did not. It is, I know, a terminal mistake to make.

I am on him artlessly, desperately, without considering the best means of taking him down, only determined to do it and going about it in whatever way presents itself. I have him by the hair, then around the throat, and his grip on the disruptor falters, and I spin him around. A glimpse of her face. Surprised, deprived of the fight. And I see his. I look small and weak to him, too, and so I lift him off the ground a few centimeters, just to see the look in his eyes, before I render him unconscious and toss his mass into the nearest huddle of his companions. She smiles savagely at me when I turn back and I do not think she knows she does it.

The fight is over and the authorities are subduing our attackers. For now, they are ignoring us because our attackers are resisting while we stand quietly. None of us presents a threat at the moment. But soon there will be a demand for explanations and the need for diplomacy and Janeway will be very busy, and then shore leave, I have no doubt, will be over. In my peripheral vision, I see a Starfleet boot kick roughly at the ribs of the man who struck her before he is hauled up by the expedient means of twisting his arm behind his back. This is done out of the captain's sight or she would stop it. I am glad she does not see.

"Who would have thought," she says, somewhat breathlessly, "that it would be Harry who got us into a brawl."

And later, Harry was very sorry, not because he had inadvertently provoked the confrontation but because the man hit her when she intervened. They always hit her.

"Why?" I ask now. My touch is so light that all I can feel is the heat of her blood.

"I'm the captain." The answer is quiet and distracted, a reply made as if she weren't fully paying attention to the question.

The tips of her fingers are cool. Her touch is so light that the coolness is all I can feel. A good thing because I think my cheekbone is probably just a little broken.

For some reason, she is coming with me to sickbay. Somehow, here we are, the two of us, in the turbolift, bound for sickbay. I had most everyone else beamed up much earlier, the injured sent to sickbay, before the local authorities had time to pay any attention. For some reason, I let Harry stay. Maybe because he so clearly wanted to stay, maybe because I caught the guilty flinch when he saw my face, maybe because I had heard the beginnings of his stifled cry when the leader backhanded me. It might have been smarter to get him to the ship in case the authorities wanted to punish one of us for the brawl. But I could feel him eager to take the responsibility.

Tuvok, too, was at my side by the time we trooped down to the headquarters of the local law enforcement. And Seven. Seven who should have included herself in my order to beam out and didn't. Seven who went for inconspicuous even as she stuck herself to my side as if she had suddenly assigned herself as my personal guard, closer even than Tuvok who, by now, understands—or at least tolerates—how much guarding I will allow. And I let her stay.

She hovered silently through the proceedings, radiating distrust and wariness, and I ignored the glances the local officers kept sending her way and let her stay and let her hover and let her brood. And now I am going to sickbay and she is coming with me, it would seem, because she stayed at my side in the corridor and gave no destination of her own to the 'lift. Instead, she studied my face, not my eyes where she is looking now, but my face, which must be rather the worse for wear, after all this time. It must really be something, the way she stared. I'm used to her lack of propriety, to her staring at me when politeness dictates she shouldn't, and it must really be something to transfix her like that. She must have never seen anything like it (I wish I had a mirror) because now she's examining it with curious fingers. It must really be something to garner this physical examination. When was the last time she touched me?

She wants to know why he hit me. Darling girl. She doesn't understand violence. Oh, she understands brute force and using it to get what you want. The Borg taught her that. She understands violence as a means to an end. But she doesn't understand inflicting pain for the sake of inflicting pain. She doesn't understand pain as an end in itself. She doesn't understand using brutality to break the spirit. She doesn't understand what we humans know inherently, know as a part of our own flawed natures. The Borg made her an engine of annihilation and as a drone she destroyed individuality and took lives, but they did not teach her cruelty or maliciousness. We are teaching her that.

It was in sickbay, the last time she touched me. After I was almost a drone, after the horrors of . . . after we led a little drone rebellion, brought a little chaos to order. The last time she touched me. The only time she's ever touched me just to touch me . . . until now, that is, because the fingers still on my face are surely no longer achieving anything but touching me.

"He hurt you to hurt Harry and the others."

We are teaching her so very well. Every day she is more human. Every day she is less innocent.

Her tone is slightly questioning, as if she's trying it out to see how it sounds, to see what it means. But that much she understands, because it worked. It hurt her.

I am a decent enough tactician that I was aware of her exact position at the time. I had seen her rise from the corner of my eye as Harry's new friend moved into my space and had noted her, an advantage our potential opponents hadn't seen. And I saw her react as I stumbled—react and then reign herself in at my signal.

And I saw the way she went for the one who hit me when she had the chance. Not for the closest and thus most likely target or for the biggest threat, but straight for him. Retaliation. Every day more human.

Every day less innocent and suddenly I can't bare it anymore. I've brought her to this. Unintentionally but undeniably, I have done it. I forced her back to humanity and I can't spare her the darkness of it. I am powerless to protect her from the viciousness we bring into the world, the viciousness in me, the viciousness in her. Always I have tried to shield her and I have failed. She has seen my own violence, has seen me brutal and ruthless. I can't save her from it, and I can't save her from her own capacity for it. It has been a futile effort and I am beaten. The darkness wells up in me and I have no fight left.

Helplessness—futility—despair—everything I have ever forced down or pushed away or rejected rises up, overwhelming me. Ruthless love I have no strength to resist, too, filling me with sharp cutting blades. Oh God. Her nearness, her touch. A tingling rush between my legs. I have never been so aroused. I have never had desire surge through me like this. I can't save her from the dark. I'm desperate to give her the rest. To still spare her the dangerous sweetness if she must have the violence and the pain is unbearable. To protect her, I have denied her, and I have failed to protect her and I can't deny her, not anymore, not if she'll let me give her everything.

She doesn't answer but I know I am correct. Our attackers knew instinctively when she intervened that she was responsible for Harry and everyone else with her, and they somehow understood that if she, the least physically imposing, would put herself between a larger, stronger member of her crew and danger, then she was connected to her people in such a way that the greatest offense to them would be an offense against her.

So he hit her and hurt her.

And she, understanding all of this, had put herself there specifically to take the blow that would have been Harry's, to keep all of us from those fatal disruptors.

I am still touching her. I realize it with a jolt. And she is letting me, but her breathing has changed and her expression is pained. I must have hurt her after all.

"Captain . . . ?" I begin to ask if she is well, and I take the injurious hand away, but she catches my hand as I withdraw it and interrupts what I would say.

Her grip is hard at first, nails pressing into my skin, a minor pain, but then she immediately loosens her grasp, though she does not release me but holds my hand in place just where she caught it, mere centimeters from her face.

"Don't," she says and I don't know what she means. I see her throat work as she swallows. The bruise draws my gaze again. Vivid and red purple and hot, her blood. She notices. "Do I look that bad?" she says and I recognize an attempt at the tone she'd usually employ to make light of it.

"No . . . I . . ." I drop my eyes. It is not right to see beauty in this. And she's caught me at it. The way she is still holding my hand there in the space between us makes me more uncomfortable. I don't understand it. I think that she might be angry at me for touching her and so I try to explain though my cheeks burn with humiliation. "It seems beautiful to me." My voice sounds weak and timid.

I'm taken aback, even now, wild as I feel. I'm stunned. I've never heard her say anything was beautiful before. I want to feel her fingertips moving over my skin again. I want to feel her lips there. Now, while I feel it hot and aching, while I can feel my pulse throbbing there. If she thinks it's beautiful, however it looks, however it hurts, I want her to explore it with her eyes and hands and mouth.

"Deck three," she says and the lift changes direction. I don't understand this either. She needs to go to sickbay. Is she so angry that she feels she must berate me in private first? She says my name. She brings my hand to her face and presses it against her cheek. She says, "I'm sorry." This too I do not understand, but now she's stretching up, her face moving closer until it's all I see. I feel her breath on my mouth before I feel her lips. Her kiss. She's kissing me.

I keep my mouth closed. I want to take her lips between mine, I want to lick her mouth, I want to suck her tongue, but I keep my mouth closed. I make myself take my hand off hers, make myself let her go, but I leave my lips against hers, barely touching. I want to kiss her hard. I want to ravish her mouth. But I leave my lips against hers, barely touching. And she—oh—she has left her hand on my cheek, her touch immediately gentle once I stopped pressing so hard. Barely touching now. Now I can barely feel her touch there beyond the stabbing flare of pain I've set off.

I complete the kiss, let our mouths part, but just a bit, just bit, and just for a second, because I put my lips on hers again. She kisses me this time, right away, and so our lips part much more quickly, and it was too quickly before, hardly a moment and barely touching. Now not touching at all, because she has taken away her hand, though I haven't given her any space and she hasn't taken any. She never does.

I have to think. I can't think. She kissed back, she let me kiss her, she kissed me. Barely touching kisses.

I want so much more. More kisses, real kisses, open mouths and tongue and teeth. And more yet. More touching. Does she—will she let me—but does she want to?

She doesn't say anything more and so I don't know what it is I am not supposed to do or what she's done that she is sorry for. I count our breaths. I have to slow my breathing just to match hers and hers is more rapid than usual. She seems to be focused on her own thoughts. Her lips are parted and her eyes somehow distant. I am focused only on her. I want her focused on me. I find I am kissing her again, just like that, without ever deciding to do it.

My mouth opened for her as soon as I sensed her moving to kiss me, just like that. No more trying to think. No careful control this time, no holding back, just giving all I have, taking all she offers. My hands in her hair, my body pressed to hers. She doesn't seem to mind. She's kissing me just as thoroughly. Arms around me, hands on my back, clasping me closer, lifting me up to her mouth.

We should talk, I think, finally. We should talk first. But then I remember her yanking that brute off me earlier, her hand squeezing his throat, remember the force in her blow, the look on her face as she sent him sailing. No need to talk.

We should get out of the turbolift, though.