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Chakotay is to Janeway, As Hair is to Sex
Chakotay is to Janeway, As Hair is to Sex
(sometimes they're in the same vicinity, but they're generally unrelated)
Marie
A calm hush pervaded the well-weathered farmhouse. Inside, the air was still and cool; an environmentally controlled contrast to the stifling heat outside. Summer was well in season. It was too hot for anything to move. Even the birds had fallen silent. All that could be heard was the low hum of the bumble bees and the scruffy brown dog panting on the back step.
The gentle rumble of a hovercraft grew closer and soon shut off. Feet clumped heavily up the stairs and the dog leapt up to meet their owner, yelping with delight. The soothing, golden silence was broken.
"Seven!"
From her position on the strip of grass behind the barn, Seven heard her wife call her name. It was just a small, irritating noise in the back of her mind. She ignored it.
"Seven? Where are you?" Kathryn's call got louder; closer.
Seven struggled to keep her focus.
Kathryn popped around the side of the barn. "There you are! Didn't you hear me calling you?" Too late, Kathryn noticed her cross-legged position and realized that she had interrupted Seven's meditations.
Again.
When Seven turned to face her, Kathryn's apologies died before crossing her lips. She managed to stutter a few incoherent noises, but that was the extent of her eloquence.
Seven was quite calm. "I will not discuss the importance of my meditations with you again, Kathryn," she said. "Next time you interrupt me, I shall simply contact Tuvok and tell him that you will explain to him why I cannot attend his grandson's coming-of-age ceremony."
The raised eyebrow, implant and all, that accompanied this statement made it clear that it was no idle threat. Kathryn, long used to such comments from Seven, would have understood this, eyebrow or no. Twenty odd years of marriage tended to do that to a couple.
After appropriate apologies were made and various pleasantries and greetings were exchanged, the women found themselves seated on the environmentally controlled porch. Kathryn paused over her coffee to wonder again how Seven had managed to air-condition an outside area. Seven would never disclose all of her secrets. Most women would consider their sexual past, or their beauty regime their most private secret. For Seven, it was her incredible feats of engineering.
Once a Borg, always a Borg.
Chuckling over this, Kathryn took another sip of her coffee. "What time will the girls be home?" she asked.
"Susan Whittaker said she would bring them back after the evening meal. They are eating at the Whittaker's after tennis practice tonight."
"And Edward?"
"Eddie," said Seven, stressing their son's preferred name, "is spending the night with your mother."
Kathryn rolled her eyes. "I will not use that ridiculous little spot of a name."
"Then do not be surprised when he does not respond to you. He is just an adolescent exerting his independence." A ginger tabby jumped into Seven's lap and she scratched him under his chin. A loud, motor of a purr started up and Seven smiled. "I don't want to talk about Eddie's name with you again, Kathryn. We've agreed to disagree on that point. Tell me about your day."
"It was fairly average I suppose," she said. "Just the usual teaching, lecturing thing. Nothing - " The grey-haired woman sat up abruptly. "I almost forgot," she said animatedly. "I have something to show you. I found it on campus today. Hang on while I get it."
Coffee slopped over the side of the mug as she set it down on the table, but that went unnoticed. Seven put the tabby down and found a cloth to wipe it up. By the time Kathryn returned, more casually dressed and magazine in hand, the table was clean and Seven was just pinning the last strand of still blonde hair up off her neck. It really was too hot a day to wear it down, even with her nanoprobes and the environmental controls together.
"I cancelled the last class today because of the heat. I really just wasn't in the mood for it. I wouldn't usually do it, but it wasn't an important class, so it didn't really matter…"
Seven leaned on the porch railing and gazed down at Kathryn, waiting.
Kathryn thought she was staring at the magazine she had brought out. Actually, Seven was taking note of how transparent her wife's cheesecloth shirt was in the afternoon sun.
Although slightly puzzled, Kathryn decided to ignore the smirk that was developing on Seven's face and continue with her story.
"I wandered over to the Cochrane Building to pick up one of the Italian ices they've been selling in this stall near the student club offices on the ground floor. There I was standing in line when I saw a few students coming out of the club offices with these magazines here."
At this, Kathryn waved her magazine about.
Seven watched Kathryn's breasts bounce slightly with the movement and wondered if it was normal for Vulcan meditation to cause one to notice things like that more acutely. She wasn't sure how that would be possible. Then again, considering her hormones and the fact that she'd been like this for two point seven six excruciating months now, she had started thinking that she may, in fact, be reaching her sexual prime. Perhaps that was the cause.
Kathryn continued. "Anyway, I realized that they were all laughing stupidly and then I heard one of them say my name, so of course, after I had my ice, I went into the club office and picked up one of these magazines. You won't believe what's in it."
After a two second lull in the conversation, during which time she was thinking thoughts that need not be repeated, Seven realized that Kathryn was waiting for a response. Prompt quick review of cortical implant.
"What is in it?" she asked momentarily.
"Stories about famous people," said Kathryn.
This wasn't what she'd expected at all. Seven failed to understand how this could be as momentous an announcement and Kathryn seemed to think it was. She stopped looking at her wife's breasts - for now.
"Please explain further."
Kathryn flicked the magazine open. "Jean-Luc Picard," she said, glancing at one page. "Nechayev," she pronounced, turning to the next. "Will Riker, Benjamin Sisco, Admiral Paris - Data, would you believe - and, here we are; me!"
Kathryn dropped the magazine on the table, open at the page about her. Within moments, Seven realized what Kathryn's issue was.
"They evaluated your sex life in relation to your hairstyle?" she said, sounding somewhat incredulous.
Such an idea would once never have occurred to her. She hadn't actually encountered this behavior before, but she had seen something similar; ancient texts called gossip columns, in the archives of the Academy library. She wasn't sure what they were doing there or what relevance they had to the curricula. From the example on the table, however, it seemed that the students had studied them well.
"Not just my sex life," Kathryn retorted, somewhat defensively. "There're a few paragraphs about their opinions on my emotions at various times of my life as well, but… it does tend to focus on my perceived sexual activities, that's true."
Seven got closer and peered over Kathryn's shoulder.
Kathryn sat down in a chair so Seven had a better view.
Upon reading, Seven's brow began to crease. She pointed at a picture of a young Kathryn in a cadet's uniform, with a bizarre sort of frizz to her hair the likes of which Seven had never before seen. "I have not ever seen any pictures of you looking like that, and I've been through all of your mother's holo-images."
Kathryn looked grumpy. "That's because I got rid of them all. My idiotic friends decided it would be a 'fun idea' to try this ancient method of hair curling. A permanent wave. I looked like Klingon on steroids, but unlike modern methods, it wasn't reversible. I had to let it grow out. I felt like an idiot."
Wisely, Seven said nothing.
"And what they've written is incredible!" Kathryn began quoting. "'With a hairstyle this electrifying, it's obvious that Janeway's love life must have been equally exciting! Young and carefree, at this stage, she was having sex with multiple partners, all genders and various species!'"
Jumping up to thump Seven on the back as she choked, Kathryn continued to insist that at that age, she hadn't been having sexual relations with anyone at all.
Seven sat down in the chair with an amused sigh and Kathryn perched herself between her legs, just in front.
"'Janeway's dull, lifeless hair reflects a dull, lifeless relationship. Cheb Packer was for her, a low point,'" Seven read.
"He wasn't that bad," Kathryn mumbled.
"He was not 'that good' either, if I remember your descriptions accurately," Seven commented sardonically.
"Yeah, yeah, eidetic memory, please don't go on about it again."
A picture of costumed Kathryn with corn-rows in her hair, leaning on the arm of Justin Tighe, prompted a comment about the distinct and segregated parts of her life. Her sex life was apparently dwindling, sliding down a long and winding road in the same fashion as the tiny plaits falling over her shoulders.
"It's not like that was my regular hairstyle. Anyway, I was working with him!" she exclaimed. "Where's the segregation? We were together all the time! And my sex life was fine, not dwindling at all. We had sex constantly! We had sex all over the ship! We - " Kathryn paused for a long moment, Seven's expression squelching her tirade. "We, uh… never had as good a time in bed as you and I do," she managed.
Seven merely pointed to the next picture.
"That's what my hair was like when we first left on Voyager," said Kathryn of the bouffant style. Sadly, the caption's true this time."
It sounded worse when read aloud, especially following the acknowledgment that it was true. "'With hair this big, Janeway had to have been hiding something - and she was - her lack of emotions for her fiancé, Mark Johnson. The size of the hair suggests she was compensating for something. We shan't say what.'"
Cue the next picture: Kathryn with a short bob.
"Not hiding anything anymore?" asked Seven.
Kathryn looked back over her shoulder at her wife. "I had my hair cut after you came aboard. Things were looking up." She grinned and disregarded the preposterous caption. The captain and the doctor? Were they insane?
A beaming, excited Kathryn looked up at them off the page. Her hair was pulled back under her wedding veil but reddish tendrils escaped around her face. "'Her hair, like herself, was waiting for marriage to break free of its constraints and embrace the joys of marital sex.'"
The loud guffaws startled the dog, who toddled over to see what the fuss was about. Kathryn rubbed his ears idly as she asked Seven; "Surely they don't think we waited til our wedding night, do they?"
Seven couldn't answer for laughing.
Hair cascading down her back in waves, Kathryn looked joyous when pregnant. The writer thought that because she was pregnant and not having sex (that almost brought on hysterics), she could finally let her hair be free and wild.
While the children were small and she was again a starship captain, her hair was of the stern, sensible style appropriate for mothers and captains. People like that were too tired and busy for sex.
People who laughed that hard might be too tired for sex too, Kathryn suggested.
Seven said that she doubted it.
Seven compared the last, more recent picture to the woman in front of her and felt her heartbeat increase again. Just thinking of how incredibly sexy Kathryn looked in that typical, hands-on-hips pose drew her attention to Kathryn's attributes once more. The caption was obviously incorrect. In the writer's opinion, with her children now teenagers, and Kathryn herself at the Academy again, teaching, she was patently too old for sex. Her hair was grey, shoulder length, and fell in soft waves. The writer was adamant that its very color meant that her sex life was now old, and dry, and shriveled up into nothingness. Kathryn had become hard, but benevolent; free of social constraints; sexless.
Seven's hands on her breasts belied that caption's validity without question.
As Kathryn's grey hair was brushed softly away from her neck, and she arched back into her wife's embrace, she asked; "I wonder what that author would have made of Admiral Janeway; the other me?"
Seven pressed her lips to Kathryn's neck. "Her hair was pinned back into a bouffant bun, not dissimilar to the style you first wore while on Voyager. Therefore, she must have been hiding something," she murmured. Her palms stroked Kathryn's belly as they traveled south.
"Her love for you," Kathryn whispered.
"Her hair was grey and hence she and her sex life were dry, sexless and shriveled," she murmured behind her wife's ear.
"Well, you were dead, after all."
"Indeed." Seven used her teeth and Kathryn moaned. "Your hair is grey," she whispered. "But I don't think you are sexless."
"I don't think so either," Kathryn husked.
"And I do not think - "
"Seven," Kathryn said, interrupting her wife mid-lick.
"Yes?"
"I'd love it if we could stop talking about my sex life and just…"
Seven smirked. Kathryn was so predictable. Once challenged, she would go out of her way to prove she was right. If that meant proving the writer of the 'sexless' comment wrong, then who was Seven to complain?
She went back to nibbling Kathryn's jawline and made a mental note to thank Miral.
She'd turned out to be quite the writer.
The end
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