Chapter Text
Twin moons courted one another, the horizon their ballroom floor, casting dual shadows that stretched long and strange across the sand. Blue and deeper blue. One as pale as the robin’s eggshells she had collected as a child, the other bruised indigo and veined with light. The system’s star, for its part, was almost familiar in its golden warmth, but it hung in a sky too wide, too saturated to be Earth’s.
Kathryn inhaled and the wind, lifted from the sea, brushed her lips with salt. She closed her eyes at the nostalgic tang of it. It did smell right. Briny with a bite. But when her eyes opened again she was instantly reminded. The waves shimmered like an opal, purple and pink and green blending and shifting in the shallows, rimmed with lace sewn of foam. Beautiful, yes. Earth, however, it was not.
She shifted, her clasped hands sliding from the top of her knees to rest around her shins. Her bare feet wiggled. Doctor’s orders had gotten her here. The view kept her.
Seven was in the surf. The water curled around her calves as she waded, plastering the hem of her soft silver-lavender sundress to them. It billowed where the breeze caught it, rippling reminiscently of seagrass, her loose hair a reflection of the sun on pale sand. Skin like polished shell, not a robin’s this time, but one plucked right from the ocean’s embrace. The moons turned her edges cobalt.
The tension crystalised between her shoulder blades, up the sides of her neck, seemed as far away as Earth was in that moment, and when Seven turned, a rebel strand of luminous hair framing the curve of her cheek, Kathryn forgot about it altogether. Seven brushed her locks back with one slender hand, and her eyes found Kathryn’s. There was something in that look, Kathryn thought, something like clarity and gravity combined, and she felt herself observed by something that not only saw her, but that chose to.
Seven tilted her head. A silent question.
Kathryn felt the ocean’s current in the pull of her heartbeat. Water wove itself in ribbons of liquid light at Seven’s ankles.
She was gorgeous, Kathryn thought. Did she know that? Did she really understand it? The naked honesty in her moonlit eyes pebbled Kathryn’s gut. Unadorned, raw. Fabric sticking to her damp skin. No. No. She was completely unaware of the beauty she shaped simply standing still.
Nothing in Seven’s posture betrayed a sense of discomfort. She just was, in that way Kathryn had come to understand as uniquely, inarguably, Seven. The elegance that came with the lack of a need to fill silences with anything but breath.
The sand was on the comforting side of heated as Kathryn sifted it over her knuckles, and it sparkled in the same colours as the waters that had worn it down. She flexed her fingers. Let the sand run away.
Seven was still watching.
Kathryn’s brow creased at the dull weight of her headache, the distant thunderstorm of it in the front of her skull. She knew the Doctor was right, loathe as she was to actually admit it, even to herself. She needed rest. Relaxation.
She wasn’t sure she would call this relaxed. And then she was wondering, and not for the first time, what it was that Seven saw when she looked at her.
Not the Captain, she hoped, at least, not only.
Seven did not look away. She did not drop her gaze. Did not pretend, as any other person probably would have, to notice a particularly interesting piece of driftwood at her feet. She looked, those eyes of hers like the planet’s twin moons.
Kathryn swallowed and tasted salt.
The day’s light was sinking now, gold into amber, washing the beach with honey that bled into the eerie blue of the moons. Still, Seven stood. Perhaps she was cold, perhaps it was a trick of the light, but her lips seemed brushed with the same purple as her dress. That dress… a deliberate departure from uniform, if her biosuit could really be called a uniform, Kathryn mused. A choice she did not understand but desired to ask Seven about.
There were many things she would like to ask Seven about.
Some manner of seabird called out and Kathryn glanced skyward. It circled overhead, the heavy beat of its wings audible above the gentle sighs of the ocean. Kathryn curled her fingers into the sand again. She rolled her shoulders, trying to dislodge the ache in them, but it only moved. Planted itself in her chest, her throat, whatever space there was beneath her skin. The bird called out.
When Kathryn’s eyes returned to the sea, Seven was gone.