"Cross my heart and hope to die." (Janeway & Seven)

Author's Note: This story takes place after "The Omega Directive".

/

It was nighttime in the holoprogram of Leonardo da Vinci's workshop. The creative chaos of half-finished paintings, sculptures and schematics was in shadow. The only light came from flickering candles and a fire burning in the hearth. The crucifix on the wall, however, was placed in exactly right corner to catch the light. Seven of Nine and Captain Janeway sat with their backs to the hearth, looking up at the figurine of Jesus Christ dying on the cross.

The paint the artist had used for his skin was a sickly white, almost the colour of a drone's, to reflect his suffering. A wreath of some thorny plant was on his head, and a drop of blood ran down his face from where the thorns had pierced him. His expression, by contrast, was serene.

"You said you came here to study this?" Janeway asked, indicating the crucifix with a nod. "What does it make you think of?"

"I am confused."

The captain smiled wryly. "You and a whole lot of others."

"Religion is an attempt to understand perfection, correct?"

"You could see it that way, yes."

"How is the life and death of one individual meant to represent that?"

Seven glanced from the nail marks on the statue's hands and feet to her own hands clasped in her lap, one human, one cybernetic, fighting back a memory of how the assimilation tubules had pierced her. She could see nothing holy about pain.

"Well … " Janeway's warm, thoughtful presence was a much needed alternative to focus on. "People have been wrestling with that question for millennia, but let me tell you what I learned in Sunday school."

"You attended a religious institution?"

"Hard to believe, I know." The older woman chuckled. "My parents insisted. They said it was important to understand our heritage. I used to get on our priest's nerves with all my questions, but he told me later on that he appreciated it. A faith that goes unchallenged, he used to say, was no faith at all."

Seven took a moment to process that. Her mind, as if often did when speaking to Janeway, felt like an elastic band being stretched to the limit. There was no challenging each other in the Collective, no difference of opinion. Either something was true, or it was not. Nine months ago, she would have shut down the conversation and walked away, but now she found herself actually looking forward to what her mentor would say next.

"We can agree that nobody's perfect, right?"

"Agreed."

"So if perfection does exist out there - for the sake of argument, let's call it God - we couldn't expect Him to accept us with all our flaws, now could we? He'd reject us as unworthy. That's how our ancestors saw it, anyway. They used to sacrifice treasure, animals, even other humans, hoping to earn forgiveness, but that's a high cost for an uncertain gain."

Seven thought of the thousands of drones the Collective had sacrificed in order to study Omega for a fraction of a second. She had always assumed it was worth it, but one look at the Captain's face when she'd recited the numbers had been enough to make her think again.

"So … imagine if God did accept us, just the way we are. If He actually chose to become one of us, go through all the pain that we go through, even sacrifice Himself to save us from our sins. Whether that's literally true or not, it's a fact that the teachings of Jesus Christ changed our conception of God forever. We're not alone anymore in our struggle for perfection. Perfection reaches down to meet us."

Janeway's eyes, which for a moment had worn the faraway look of someone lost in abstract thought, focused on Seven again with an affectionate smile. "Does that answer your question?"

Seven was too preoccupied to smile back. In her mind's eye, she was back in Cargo Bay Two, staring into the bright blue light of the harmonic resonance chamber, watching the silver pearls of Omega molecules form a glimmering chain of order out of chaos. It felt like a long time before she could focus once more on the ordinary blue of the Captain's eyes.

"Is that what I saw? Perfection reaching down to meet me?"

"Only you can answer that."

"But we destroyed it." Seven swallowed a lump in her throat as she thought of so much power and beauty gone in a flash. "I destroyed it."

"We had to," Janeway said sternly. Seven bowed her head. They'd had this argument too many times already, and besides, the Captain was right. "But that doesn't mean we can't remember it. On the contrary."

Seven did not need to be told this. She had an eidetic memory, and even if she hadn't, that moment would have been seared into her mind for the rest of her life.

"What do you believe, Captain?"

"About Omega? Or my beliefs in general?"

"The latter."

Janeway shrugged in an uncharacteristically awkward way, looking many years younger for a moment. "Oh, you know me. I'm a scientist. I have a hard time believing in anything I can't prove … still, I'd be lying if I said I never pray."

"That sounds complicated."

"It sure is."

"What do you pray for?"

Janeway was silent for so long that Seven nearly retracted the question, worrying that it might be too intrusive, but the older woman didn't seem offended, only thoughtful. "Hmm … basic things, I guess," she said eventually. "Strength. Patience. Help to get out of whatever crisis we're in. Gratitude when it's over."

"Do you ever perceive an answer?"

"Not directly … but we're still alive, so who knows?"

"Captain … "

"Hm?"

Seven hesitated. The Borg drone in her was disgusted, the scientist embarrassed, but the lost little girl couldn't help asking. "Would you pray for me?"

"Oh, Seven, I already do." Janeway squeezed both her hands, assimilation tubules and all. "But you can pray for yourself just fine."

"Can I?" She surprised herself by how much she wanted to believe that, but wanting was not the same as believing. "Do you consider me to have a … soul?"

She remembered her life as a drone, eighteen years of mindless obedience, assimilating people and planets without a second thought. Annika Hansen must have had a soul once, but could it survive that?

"C. S. Lewis would say we don't have souls, we are souls. And if you can ask that question, you already are."

"Are you certain?"

"I promise." Janeway traced two lines over the Starfleet badge on her jacket. "Cross my heart."

… and hope to die, that was the other half of the saying. Seven had heard it more than once among the crew, usually in the form of hyperbole, such as when Paris was telling one of his stories. If someone had asked for her opinion of the idiom, she would have called it unnecessarily macabre. She had never stopped to think about its origins before.

Kathryn Janeway was no god, obviously - she could be stubborn and arrogant and altogether human - but she would literally die for her people if she had to. In that respect, she had at least one thing in common with the person whose likeness hung on da Vinci's wall.

Seven's first prayer went up silently, in the blink of an eye, between squeezing her mentor's hand and letting go. Perhaps it fell into nothingness. Perhaps not.

Keep her safe.