anyone else? Unheeding of her surroundings, Annie started forward and banged into the table upon which the vase had been balanced. The vase tumbled off, struck the floor, and shattered. She walked right over it, the pieces crunching beneath her boots. “Oh my God,” she said again. “Annika?”
She didn’t notice the young woman flinch at the name, and bite back a response. Instead she said evenly, “I’m home,” and then Annie was across the room and threw her arms around her. The pressure knocked the breath right out of her and she had to gasp to get it back.
Annie drew back for a moment and touched Seven’s face where the implants had once adorned it. She could see where they had been; the skin around it was slightly browner.
As if reading her mind, Seven said, “I could go in for tanning treatments to even out the skin, but I decided to let the sun do it naturally.”
“Oh my God!” she said a third time and hugged Seven once again, so fiercely this time that it seemed to Seven as if her ribs might snap. “Oh, my little girl! This is… it’s a miracle!”
Tears began to run down Seven’s face. They came so easily these days, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was this: this place, this person, this life. She said the first thing that came to mind: “I’m sorry about your vase.”
“To hell with the vase,” said Aunt Annie. “Let it be broken. At least my family is back together.”
iii.
Seven had spent most of the week at Aunt Annie’s doing one of two things: listening to stories of her youth, and sleeping. Fortunately at no point did she do both of those things simultaneously.
My name is Seven. I will not be Annika. Not for anyone. That had been the immediate response that had almost sprung from her lips. It had become reflex to her.
But this was the woman for whom she had been named. This was the woman who had saved her life in infancy. This was the one thing left from the life that she had once known, a life that she was feeling the need to connect with in order to become a truly whole person. And the first thing she was going to do to that end was to reject the name that was based on Annie Kalandra’s own?
Not for anyone but her.
Annie regaled Seven with all the stories she’d had pent up all these years. Tales of little Annika: her first word (“light,” as it turned out, and not the more predictable “mama” or “dada”), her first faltering steps. All the typical remembrances of a life long past. Plus she also had many other stories that, as a close friend of the family, she’d learned: tales of Seven’s father when he was growing up, and how he had first met her mother (it was a long, protracted story having to do with an umbrella). These were the kinds of tales that one heard incessantly growing up so that, by the time someone was as old as Seven was, they would be common knowledge, part of the family history.
In this case, however, it was the equivalent of getting a protracted information dump in one extended sitting. It was rather odd for Seven in many respects. She was hearing about her own life, and the lives of her parents and family, and yet it was like listening to a series of anecdotes about total strangers. But at least she was able to listen with empathy. When she was Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One, the stories would have been meaningless. When she was the recovered Seven of Nine aboard Voyager, the stories would have had some mild interest to her in that they related to a past that she knew was hers, even if she did feel utterly disconnected from it. Now, as Annika Hansen—in actuality if not in regular practice—she was able to appreciate them for what they were, even as she was only partly able to… well, to assimilate them.
She realized that she was coming up against the limits of her new status. She was now fully human in most aspects, with no trace of her Borg identity manifest on her body. Yet—and it was difficult for her to admit, but it was true—inside she was still dealing with the learning curve of being a “normal” person.
She didn’t allow any of her inner concerns to be on display for her “aunt,” however.