kejsarinna

Who exactly are you describing here, Kathryn?

you are annika "seven shots" hansen, brand new science ensign aboard the uss voyager, just graduated, ready to run as far from earth as space can take you. in pursuit of the maquis, you end up in the delta quadrant, marooned on said maquis' ship and awkwardly folding into their crew along with the rest of yours. your new captain, chakotay, is struggling to unite the starfleet and maquis crews. you yourself are not impressed, but over time, he wins your respect and your crew begins to work together to get back to the alpha quadrant.

you remain to the side of the crew, not ostracised, but a little alone. you pick up some shifts in the improvised medbay. occasionally, other crewmembers try to befriend you, or flirt with you, but that stops after you broke a crewman's wrist in a panic. b'elanna, at least, grudgingly approves. you have breakfast once a week with her and passive aggressively snipe at each other the whole time. it's the highlight of your social calendar.

then you meet the borg. based off your parents' crackpot notes, you strongarm chakotay into making a pact with the borg and you two liberate yourselves the only human drone you've met - one of the many starfleet lost in action, former chief science officer kathryn janeway, who is reckless, insane, angry, and bitterly driven to destroy the borg and protect her new crew with everything she has.

she's been assimilated for as long as you've been alive and had traumas that predate your conception. the joint funeral for her old ship was highly attended. she was the dead bestfriend of the turncoat security officer chakotay is still mad about having trusted. her every plan is an abstract suicide attempt and she does things to the ship's engines to get it going faster that makes your heart faint and b'elanna's hair grey. she has screaming arguments with the captain in the Mess Hall and insists on patching noxiously brewed coffee that make her borg-stomach sick into an iv line. she is absolutely petrified to be close to you in case she assimilates you by accident.

you still haven't beaten her at Velocity.

and what do you think to yourself then, annika "seven shots" hansen, thinly-masked neurodivergent who prefers machines to people and is openly scornful of the social rules everyone else seems to know (while also, desperately wishing you understood them yourself)?

T'Pel asking with pure Vulcan sarcasm if they had fun and in the middle of Tuvok replying that Vulcans only do their duty not have Fun, Janeway (still slightly hungover and wearing sunglasses) slings an arm around his shoulders and says, "SO MUCH fun. You should've been there, T'Pel. You should've seen the way your man risked it all to save my sorry ass from a sentient liquid people. We almost died again."

T'Pel: "Again?"

Tuvok: "....we meditated after."

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon