When he next initiated, three hours had passed. Apparently, Kes had thought a rest would do him good.

Also apparently, his startup had been a bit uneven. He was sitting on the bunk, braced by his elbows on his knees, and propped sideways against the sloping wall like a cargo sack. As if his mass projection had kicked in before his cognition.

Another unsettling first. But, almost certainly, it wouldn't matter.

"How are you?" Beside him, Kes' voice was careful, as if she didn't want to narrow the question to just one meaning.

He held his free hand out in front of him, flexing and extending the fingers. Motor control seemed normal. Experimentally, he tugged a bit more power, calling a holographic tricorder to his hand.

What he got instead was a slippery, translucent ghost, with just enough holographic mass to fall halfway through his hand.

He dismissed the half-condensed matter back to energy. Clear enough: with the emitter battery dead, there would be no more brute-force counterattacks for him.

Their eyes met; he shrugged. That had been a likely outcome of the trip.

"It may have been worth it," he said finally. "I have a number of new ideas to try."

At least now they were armed with knowledge. Even if the self-diagnostic had armed him with rather more knowledge than he'd wanted.

Putting it from his mind, he told her about the pod, and how even assimilated crew might not have survived the landing.

Kes nodded, grim but unsurprised. Her capacity for shock on that subject had run out. She turned to sit back cross-legged on the bunk opposite him. In the subterranean dark of the shuttle, her new additions to the energy garden had a faint phosphorescence of their own, throwing the shadows of her own features across her face. "Want to tell me what else happened, now?"

He considered it for a moment, telling her of just the encounter. Inviting her to obsess with him, as part of him had been obsessing offline, over precisely how hard he'd pried the drone's augmentations from its flesh. Whether he should have used precious energy to give it pain control. Or, conversely, vivisected it as it twitched there, paralyzed but fully sensate, to seek out more useable knowledge.

Like how the safeguards worked, perhaps, that kept a drone from navigating its cube into a star.

"No," he said finally. It was his own decision to live with. "I don't believe any of it would truly horrify you. Except my tactical performance, perhaps. The second drone almost had me." He produced a smile. "After all, I'm a doctor, not a prize fighter."

Kes searched his face, undeterred. Short of a wholehearted commitment to deceive, he knew he had a dismal poker face. He'd never quite realized, though, what an absurd constraint that was for a hologram.

So he gave in, just a bit. "You already know my functioning's not optimal here. But I don't think there's a matrix failure imminent. And I don't think the glitching was responsible for the close call." He produced a cheerful bedside smile. "I'll of course inform you if it starts to pose a performance risk."

"Come on." A human phrase she'd doubtless picked up from Harry. "You don't really think your performance is what I'm worried about."

"No. But there's no need at the moment to worry about anything."

Since she knew approximately how true that was, he reasoned, that made it true enough.

Kes was silent for a long moment. Finally, she sighed, clearly unimpressed with all the tragic nobility of his silence. "It's what I get, for my own first few months here, I guess."

So instead, she held one hand out in front of her, palm up. A long straight slice in the skin ran down her index finger, at least the depth of the dermis, cleaned but recent. "Do you feel up to taking a look at this, then? A foliage sample I was prepping turned my knife. I've been using the antibiotic, but there's a bit of weakness too. I was wondering about the tendon."

"Ah," he said gratefully, palpating the distal tissues first. "Metal knives and industrial accidents. This entire experience is like time travel to pre-Pasteurian Earth. Let's see if we can do a bit better than sacrificing livestock over it."

She had calculated well. The steps of checking capillary refill, testing flexion strength to rule out complete separation of the tendon, and improvising a splint to keep tension off it, all steadied him quite a bit.

At least until his imaging and creativity subroutines chose that moment to join forces again, and throw up a fresh hell of an image. Little Naomi Wildman, stumbling away down a flickering corridor, her overalls stained where she'd lost bladder control from terror. Close behind her, the shuffling thing that had been her mother.

His hands flickered out for a moment, and the splint clattered to the floor. Reaching down, he made a series of unsuccessful swipes, at and through it.

He had expected this to start, but not quite yet.

"No major matrix failure imminent," he amended. Then, with more bitterness than he'd realized he felt: "Did the doctors in any of those other worlds lose cohesion from contact with reality?"

Kes picked the splint up for him silently with her free hand and held it steady, looking away while he composed himself. After a moment, he was able to take it from her.

"I only know of one," she said finally, "who rewrote himself to face the end of the world with me."

That threatened his decision all over again. Finishing the bandage, his eyes focused on the small wonder of living flesh under his fingers, he imagined telling her everything. Not only the excursion, but the findings from his self-diagnostic.

Lieutenant Torres had instructed him in the symptoms of a second matrix destabilization, after Kes had brought him through the first. His current matrix, designed to handle inflicting small harms like surgery in the course of treatment, had been able to hold up so far with some creative accounting. But it couldn't endure this new life of violence. Even less so after a catastrophic failure to keep nearly any of his crew alive.

Now that symptoms had started in earnest, he could provide a prognosis. No critical functions had yet been compromised, and those could be shuffled around if needed, into the last parts of the matrix to fail. So much of his program was extraneous now, anyway; he'd hardly be called on again to reverse diabetes. He should be able to operate with occasional glitching for another three or four years.

More than enough to finish out Kes' likely lifespan here.

But the solitude she'd worn like a second uniform since landing on this world had taken too long to dissipate. He wasn't quite able to tell her something that might bring it back and that didn't, all things considered, matter.

So, in the end, he gave her a grateful smile, and said nothing. He finished the splint, lifted the worktable back against the wall, and stood to pace out his new borders.

. . . . .

It was later that evening, after the clouds had broken and they'd retreated to the shuttlecraft again under the clear ringlight, that it hit him.

He was re-cataloguing the medical supplies, to see what they would need to develop substitutes for soonest. It left him with unused processing power – a human would have complained of boredom - which his randomization functions, intended to activate when a creative diagnostic leap was needed, snatched up and went rogue with. Perhaps they thought they were being called on to fix his matrix; whatever the case, they kept sifting through memories and possibilities, flashing them up at him while he tried to read expiration dates.

It was the sort of glitch that would begin to happen more often now. But these images, for once, weren't all violent.

The Captain in her ready room, studying the strange properties of the planet where she'd brought Voyager to die. The sight and feel of using his hands to kill, to examine without consent. The Cube, a threat speaking itself wordlessly in the evening sky. Chakotay, telling another folksy, spot-on parable that almost certainly didn't really come from his people. The rings above them, lighting the night in a silence without signals.

It came together there, in fact, exactly like making another diagnosis.

He lifted his head and set down the emergency thoracic brace. "Your message from 8472. I think I know what they meant."

Kes, sitting by the viewport watching the sea, looked back at him and blinked. He considered in passing that his theories might be less reliable now than previously, but he was already settling at the worktable, off and running with this one.

"We know how badly the Borg want you. Now consider this." He leaned forward. "The technological stew that formed me was new when it was installed on Voyager. It was Starfleet's first use of holographic technology in a core system. It's an unpredictable mix - the partial autonomy, the interactions between the gelpacks and the code and the corporeal sensorium. They were cautious with it. Medical application, in a fixed space, for short time periods. A careful next step, before exploring other uses."

He looked down at his own hands. "But now we know. If you make a hologram with stunning tactile precision and let it run far longer than intended, all it needs to become an unhinged drone killer is access to its own code. And a few months of helpless rage." For completeness' sake, though it hurt his ego – which had otherwise been quite enjoying the speech so far – he added, "And that's with repurposed, first-generation technology."

"Well," she said mildly, after a moment, with an assurance that suggested she'd already given the subject some thought, "I don't think you're entirely unhinged. But I follow you. But there's only one portable emitter."

He waved a hand over it airily. "That's a bauble. Wonderful for an away mission, but you wouldn't need it on a warship mounted with external emitters. Or a station, or a planet."

She raised her eyebrows as it sank in fully. "You think what your Starfleet needs is time to militarize holograms."

The excitement buoyed him again. "Perhaps by now, they're there already. Imagine an Emergency Defense Hologram. Imagine a thousand of them, running on matrices purpose-built for the job. If the full Collective thought that might be operational soon, they'd be back in the Alpha quadrant immediately to head it off while they could. But the only cube that's observed the possibility –" he glanced up through the shuttle roof – "is distracted, and acting erratically, and isolated. Every month it stays here without rejoining the Collective makes it more likely Starfleet will be ready."

Then, on the subject of exactly what all this meant for them, one of his errant memories proposed itself as an illustration. "So. Commander Chakotay used to trot out a story when the other senior staff found something to be obsessive about. A device from pre-warp Earth called a monkey trap. Imagine a jar with a hole in it, baited with…" He paused, obscurely irritated to find his database coming up dry on the subject of preferred monkey foods.

"Whatever a monkey finds irresistible," she finished, with what looked suspiciously like tolerant amusement. "After all, you're a doctor, not a zookeeper."

There was nothing for it but to acknowledge a point fairly scored; he inclined his head. "Regardless, the hole is big enough to reach in through, but too small to pull out a fistful of bait through. The bait just has to be just that good."

"So the monkey won't let go." Kes sat back against the bulkhead and thought it over, absorbing her own putative role as the bait. "It's a long chain of 'maybe's. I do agree you're terrifying now - the Captain would call you a force of nature. But your only evidence the full Collective doesn't already know is that they're not here in force already."

He thought of the scarred drone staring up at him from the ground. "Given how Borg take what they want, I consider that strong evidence."

She shook her head. "There could be hundreds of cubes elsewhere in this system already. Or advancing on Federation space right now, or both. And they could still have their own reasons for playing this game with us."

"They aren't known for games."

"I hear this cube is acting erratically. And you're not known for making assumptions." She leaned forward, with something like pity on her face. "Unless the word 'euthanasia' frightened you so badly, you'll take any story that rules it out."

He hadn't considered that; the theory felt so right, so corroborated, the way a correct diagnosis spontaneously explained tens of other facts. Like his own success adapting to hold off the drones, or their clear interest in his emitter.

But it did, also, neatly require that Kes keep providing proof of life each time the Borg looked in on her. And perhaps at this point his long-suffering matrix would endorse any belief that left him with any crew at all.

"I do believe it," he said finally, "but perhaps you're not the only one whose judgement is impaired. You must admit the idea of an EDH is appealing." Nearly as good as being alive to see it. But then he hesitated. "Perhaps it's a bit bleak as well, though. The two of us, living to be a distraction. I'm sorry."

Kes laughed. Not entirely the laugh he'd known on Voyager - there was an edge there of terrible knowledge - but the light and heat that had always warmed him there were in it too. She drew her knees up to her chest and looked back out the side viewport, considering.

"I don't not believe it," she said. "After everything I just said, it doesn't feel wrong to me, either. Maybe incomplete. But not because it's bleak. Some of the possibilities that come up at times to me now…Yours is cheerful by comparison. And I do see the beauty of it. An EDH fleet. Hard not to imagine them here, filling this sky."

She rubbed her eyes. "And maybe in the end, we are a distraction, and everyone we loved on Voyager was a means of transport, to a place where we could hold out a little longer. While the real story happens across the galaxy, to people who will never know what happened here."

Indeed. For him, being a sentient sideshow was almost a design specification. But the humanoid mind was designed to be the hero of its own story, which it always expected to end happily. What a jolt for it, to find itself a sideshow as well.

But at the moment, that wasn't even her point. "But what matters more is, your way, this wasn't all a lie. We're fighting for the people our friends would have fought for. That's something. Worth being the best distractions we can, just in case it's true."

"Precisely." He laughed once, half to lighten the air, half at himself. "To live well, as a sentient sideshow, I recommend arrogance. I suspect mine was coded in as a sort of compensation."

She laughed again with him. But it was followed this time by a flash of unexpected emotion across her face.

"What?"

Kes shook her head slightly and reached up to pat his shoulder once. "Relieved you made it back." She rose and turned to inspect her energy garden, shifting the weight of the gelpacks around cautiously, checking on the root balls.

Following what, for lack of an accurate word, he termed instinct, he followed her to the other side. He leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. "Another compensation is relentless nosiness about the lives of others."

Fingers still working, she looked up at him with that indulgent warmth he was beginning to recognize. And then, for whatever reason, apparently decided to take the first step in their game of secrecy toward disarming.

"Really, that was most of it. I missed you. These months, I kept thinking, the Captain would mourn and move on. And you would tell me to redirect my energies. And Tuvok…imagine his opinion on the logic of persisting on the energy garden." She threw her hands up a bit and laughed once at herself, leaning back against the bulkhead opposite him.

"So I did give up on it. Three times. The logical thing was to focus on food production and combat. Coming back to it felt like failing, every time. But now you're here, going on about a new theory in your lecture voice – sorry – and part of me is still thinking, this didn't deserve to work, the vines and the gelpacks should never have agreed to it, and I still don't quite believe it. I never thought I'd hear lecture voice again.

"The universe murdered everyone we loved. And then it gave you back. I've been so angry – which is a learned emotion where I'm from, by the way, but I've had practice now. Getting you back, would you believe it, made part of me even angrier."

Even though that anger seemed mostly weary and remembered just now, he believed her. In the too-still frame of her shoulders against the wall, the careful minimality of her gestures, was the control of one who knew herself to be dangerous when angry.

"Why me, why us two? You see? As if that made what happened to the others all right."

It took him a moment to realize he was nodding at that, his own unforgotten but back-burnered rage recognizing itself in hers.

"I know you know. But against my will, at the same time, I'm…" She shook her head, voice shearing on the last word. "So grateful. I can't forgive the universe, as if that mattered. But with you here, I don't mind being a sideshow, and I don't want to be only angry anymore." She paused for breath, almost visibly setting it aside. "I'm just not sure how to stop yet. But I'm trying."

And then, with a fleeting grin at her own rough internal seas, "I'm babbling. But I wish you'd go on talking again, any tenuous theory you want, till it puts me all the way to sleep."

He was speechless for a long moment.

Among other things, he'd been largely unaware of lecture voice.

Finally, he tried, "I have some unforgettable narrated holoessays from the Demon Planet…"

But he trailed off. At first, because it was too glib, too soon for pictures of the beloved dead.

And then - as she met his eyes, without retreat or demand, in the lengthening silence – from a growing sense that such a gift from her created room for a return in kind. A small opened space for impossible things, some alchemical wormhole.

A shorter distance between points. Between photonic waves and organic particles. Between him and this last living miracle left to him, forged from courage and botany, whom it had needed a strange world to make so utterly familiar.

And after all, his first tweak to himself here had been to increase risk acceptance.

"I made," he said more carefully, sitting back down across from her, "another set of edits while I was at it. Minor compared to the others, but possibly useful for a long stay here. Even, possibly, for some distraction from anger for us both. These, I can show you, if you'd like."

He held out his hand again on his knee, palm up.

After a moment, she sat on the bunk and laid hers in it.

He looked up to watch her face, as he traced his thumb, careful and precise, up round her thumb and along the crease of her wrist. A gratuitous motion, with no clinical purpose, she would well know. He was burning power out of all proportion with the effort; a humanoid heart would have been racing.

"As you noted, I don't make assumptions," he said evenly, nonetheless. "But under the circumstances, some flexibility seemed warranted. Though if you don't agree, I suppose I'd need to retain these memories permanently, to prevent this happening again."

Kes drew in a long breath and let it out; her fingers just barely threaded between his, tips coming to rest on his knuckles. It was almost clinical – she was testing the texture of his projected skin – but thirsty too, beneath a near-disbelief.

"But what do you want?" she asked him, in the small space between them. "What would it be, for you?"

It took him a moment to think how to answer, and she misunderstood the delay.

"I know it's not the same. I'm not the same either now. At this point, I'd probably accept pity. But not something that could harm you further. Or that you'd regret."

Given their circumstances, the idea of this adding much to their tally of regrets had grown faintly ludicrous. But she was right that while he could appreciate beauty with the best of them, desire, per se, hadn't been built into his design. He had been planning to get around to experimenting with it, until his last recoding disaster.

But other things were thick in the room there, making the moment intoxicating and perilous, heavy with some delight he was afraid both to taste and to miss. The thought of being wanted in himself, for himself. The frivolity of using touch for no purpose but its own. The giddy recklessness of crossing a shadowed threshold together. The warmth of seeing her put herself in his hands, after what she'd seen them do. The cleanness of doing something simple that caused no one any harm. He wanted to explain those, and it was too much to say, but perhaps –

"I want," he said finally, "to be with the last person I've loved who's still left to me. However I can, however we've changed, for as long as I have. In fact," he added, as he realized it, "I believe I want that very much."

She let out another long breath, taking that in. "All right. Not so different. But what about damage?"

Accepting another small risk, he lifted one hand to the side of her head. "This was a coded restraint, not a matrix violation. I'd say the risks that apply are more the usual ones for these situations."

Kes dipped her head toward him, her forehead against his. His light-touch receptors there fired, for what he realized was the first time, and his fingers slipped into the golden chop of her hair. Using the sensory input channels there directly, with no need for analysis, was like a jolt of current.

"But if we proceed, I'm still going to require some parameters. I don't have instinct to rely on here, Kes." His voice sounded almost plaintive in his own ears, and ego rose to meet the challenge, as his fingers tangled there against her scalp. "Though no doubt my tactile acuity will more than compensate."

Her hands had lit on his shoulders meanwhile, making little questioning movements as she confirmed that his image included clavicles, scapular ridges, the bunching of musculature with movement. So he felt the transmitted movement of her laughter, as her eyes met his and they held there.

"I've never doubted it. I'll try to keep up." Then, with mock sternness, one hand dropping to press flat against his chest between them: "One parameter. This does not become a case study in a medical journal. Not even those small ones that only circulate in the Delta quadrant."

Having already heroically ruled out suggesting it, if only a few moments before, he only laughed. "Even if you took the first-author spot?"

Still mock-solemn, she pretended to consider it. "Tempting, but still a no." And then, with real seriousness again, "Truth is, I was about to ask you for parameters."

He thought about that for a moment. Their combined expertise here included his preprogrammed intimate health data for four hundred species, none of which were present; his sparse clinical notes on Ocampa reproduction; and presumably her single night with Zahir at the Mikhal outpost. He had thought that interlude risky and distracting at the time; now, he hoped with real fervor it had also been educational.

"Right," he replied, with far more confidence than he felt. "Trial and error it is, then."

Then, because it was becoming inexplicably difficult to form a detailed plan for proceeding –those exploring movements that her hands had resumed, perhaps, though he hoped fervently she wouldn't stop - he settled for a simple first step.

They needed a position in the cramped shuttle that allowed some freedom of movement with minimal strain on a humanoid body. Over her head he surveyed the options, and settled on reaching round to fold the worktable back down behind her. "Perhaps, if you sit here and I stand, then given our relative heights…"

"Not to mention," she agreed, convincingly solemn again despite some unaccountable clumsiness as she shifted back, "this may be how I've pictured it."

He laughed out loud this time, reassured. And thankfully, as he brushed back the hair from her face, the right physiologic shifts were coming into view now, the skin flushing and the pupillary dilation. Strange, how gratifying that was. If only he had them in his own imaging files too, to show her in return.

The one language he didn't speak. But it gave him courage enough to try a second step.

"Very well. Now if you'll just provide a bit of verbal feedback up front, I'll be able to narrow down the light-touch parameters." Of course he heard himself, creating another of those awkward photonic-organic interactions she'd spent years teaching him to avoid. But in the silence that followed, even while he ran a testing finger down her arm, he still didn't fully realize he was bracing again too, reliving every memory of the crew's raised eyebrows and incredulous laughs from his first year active, till Kes laid her other hand over his.

"The hand of a friend, who's not trying to eat or assimilate me…If you knew how it feels already, you wouldn't worry."

At those images, his own hand glitched out for a moment, just long enough for her to notice. When it returned, Kes brought it to midline to fold between her own, clearly aware this was part of the deal.

But that moment had also, apparently, driven home a larger issue. When she spoke again her voice was more uncertain. "It's a different game for you, though. Isn't it?"

And this time he understood. Glitches aside, she knew the reward pathways in his code didn't include sensory input at all.

So he explained as best he could. That he was planning to restructure them based on tonight, so really it was a chance to set her stamp on things. And anyway those pathways were lighting up like a Klingon fire carnival already, from being wanted this way, by her. Likely due to a crossed wire, as it were, with the reward pathway for being appreciated. But he didn't care, and anyway was going to stop babbling, and find the pressure and pace that Ocampan neural corpuscles reacted best to, if she could just please clarify whether that or that was closer.

She did laugh, then, but he didn't mind this time. And this time she answered. And somehow undeterred, they found their way into that give-and-take of trial and error. Then, through it, at some point, to a far side less conscious, more relaxed yet increasingly driven.

And then her fingers tested the back of his collar, and he realized he'd left one glaring issue unaddressed.

"The thing is," he said against her temple, "I don't have any other imaging files for myself. Skin and the other revisions would take an hour."

In his defense, he'd been in a blinding rage when he'd removed the restraints on intimacy. No mood for thinking through the logistics of actually breaking them.

Kes was silent for a moment, thoughtful. She pulled back a bit to look at him. "Truth is," she said finally, hand going to the front of his uniform. "Right now, this is your skin, isn't it?" The pads of her fingers splayed out across his chest, not moving; more like absorbing. "For now, if you want, why not just turn up the sensory gain a bit?"

Ridiculously, that broke though him in some way; quietly, but somehow thoroughly. Being seen in a way that had never felt possible enough to hope for. Intense to the point of discomfort, and unthinkable to have gone this long without.

She must have seen something on his face. "What?"

They hadn't yet kissed – it wasn't an Ocampan practice, and he'd been unsure if it meant anything to him, either – but just then, it was the closest thing to the answer he wanted to make. And Kes, if momentarily surprised, seemed to understand it.

Over the next hour, it became clear to him. Whatever else it was, this was a language. Not preprogrammed in him like the others, but still learnable. And in it, he could finally speak all his grief and tenderness, and finally hear her answer.

. . . . .

A/N: This last scene is what I wrote this fic around, and what I most wanted to get right. For those who have made it this far, I'd be grateful for any constructive criticism you might be willing to share. Any area, but especially:

This last scene: did it capture a coherent emotional tone? If so, was it compelling? If not, where did it go off track? Was the choreography clear throughout? If not, where?

The 'hook' (first chapter, first section): did it make you want to read on, or are you here despite it? If the latter, what didn't work?

All the exposition through dialogue: there's been a lot, because crucial events happen to Kes while our main character is deactivated. Does it work, or does it get info-dumpy? If the latter, where?

The pacing: after the shuttle crash at the beginning, we spent a couple of chapters with minimal action, as our main character worked up the nerve to take a more active role. Was that too long? If it dragged, where did the dragging start?

The remainder is 2-3 more weekly installments. Thanks for reading. I'm still so happy to have rediscovered this terrific show.