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lady-wildflower · 1 year

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We’re Not Gonna Live With Fear - Star Trek: Picard season 3 episode 10 The Last Generation

So I wasn’t entirely satisfied with some of the ending of Star Trek: Picard, season 3 episode 10, just because it didn’t feel like it got quite enough time (which is weird, ‘cos it’s almost half of an hour long episode, but hey), and I felt like writing a supplementary fic to do with the deassimilation of Jack - it’s a similar complaint to what I had with Voyager and the ending of Unimatrix Zero, being assimilated isn’t something that you get away from scot-free. I mean, in First Contact there were full-fledged fully implanted drones within an hour, whatever mechanism handled Jack’s assimilation would have had plenty of time to get all fiddly with Võx. So here’s a fanfiction, crossposted from AO3.

Jack Crusher deals with his initial recovery from the Borg Queen after being assimilated in 2402. Word count: 6,255.

Note: I also changed the initial bit a little so he didn’t remove the thing on his face with… what, his hands??? On the way from the transporter room? I think it may have been a production decision to make him look more human but I don’t have to worry about that and I have different priorities so I ain’t doing that. And I don’t imagine the shit on his hands would have just been gloves mate.

“Welcome to the Enterprise,” his father said warmly, smiling at him as he waved a hand at the brightly lit yesteryear not-quite-retro-but-nearly-there, classic really, Bridge of the Galaxy class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Jack still didn’t know quite how his parents had dug a blown-up crashed ship out of the mothballs of what he had been sure had been the complete totalling of the Enterprise D, but there they were, standing on her bridge. Worf, the very model of a modern major Klingon, was snoring like a puppy in the counselor’s chair beside Sydney and Alandra’s Dad, and his weirdly elderly robot chum Data. Riker and Troi were embracing in the relief that death had not done them part, and the viewscreen showed a prolonged hail from the U.S.S. Titan A, depicting Seven of Nine, Sydney, Alandra, and Raffi. And there, up in the raised aft of the bridge behind the broad tactical station, Jack’s Mum and father stood on either side of him, holding him as he held his armored arms around them right back, with pride. Of course, it wasn’t that idyllic. Because Jack was still reeling from the disconnection of his consciousness from the Borg Collective. And that had been a comparatively tiny Collective. His body? Implants perforated his form, he was covered from toe to neck in armor with tubule sockets and piping all over him, the skin of his visible face was almost entirely mottled with black circuited veins and gray, some of his hair had fallen out - much to his consternation, as a vain young man dreading the imposition of early-onset baldness thanks to his father’s genetics - and the right side of his face was dominated by the black cranial implant that clawed up toward his nose under his eye and its red laser, and that also happened to be why his vision was green-tinged and filled with grids and analyses in Borg codes he could inexplicably understand, telling him all about how the systems of the Bridge worked and connected to the rest of the ship.

“So. This is where I was cooked up,” Jack said amusedly, glancing over at Riker. “She’s in good shape for getting blown up and wrapped around a planet,” he noted, and his father chuckled slightly under his breath.

“Oh, that is thanks to Mister LaForge. Sneaky fellow spirited away the saucer section off Veridian III twenty years ago and has been refurbishing the old lady in secret ever since,” Picard told him, and Geordi smiled smugly back at them. “And a good thing he did too. Who knows what would still be happening if he hadn’t,” he said, his tone getting a little morose as he turned back to Jack and his eyebrows did that weird scrunchy thing they did when he was emotional. His Mum’s hand patted his shoulderblade plating gently.

“You have no idea how glad I am that you’re back,” Beverly told him. “And you are so very thoroughly grounded, Jack Edward Crusher! Running off like that, getting yourself assimilated! Gave me the worst heart attack any mother’s ever had!” she exclaimed, a touch of sarcasm in her voice as she slapped his arm, but probably hurt her own hand more than his arm. Jack scoffed self-consciously. Yeah, he had done that hadn’t he?

“In my defense, I did sort of have the Borg yelling at me my whole life. It was bound to happen eventually,” he quipped. His mother’s expression immediately softened and she pursed her lips, raising her hand to his cheek.

“Ohh… well, it’s a good thing you’re a doctor’s son. Let’s see how bad the damage is,” Beverly said softly, fetching the sleek tricorder she’d discarded and flipping it open. “As soon as we can rendezvous with the Titan I’ll ask their chief medical officer to stock us up and we’ll get started getting all of this crap off of you then. For now, a good scan and a screwdriver will have to do,” she said, and Jack frowned with his one good eyebrow.

“Here? Why not head over to the Titan?” Jack asked. His Mum raised her eyebrow.

“No no. I de-assimilated your father in this ship’s sickbay, and so help me like father like son I will do the same for you young man,” Beverly replied, and Jack couldn’t help but smile a little at that. He was beginning to accept Picard as his father, not quite his Dad yet, but his father, and he supposed the connection was sweet. The tricorder started twittering methodically as his mother began scanning him, and almost immediately her eyebrows were knitted together in concern. He knew why - as soon as he’d even thought about it, his ocular overlay had spewed up a green whole-body diagram of his implants into his peripheral vision, and boy were there a lot of them splayed through him. It almost made him vomit; it was bad enough just keeping away from looking at the black exo-plating that covered his body, arms, and hands, but to imagine - no, remember - all the bits and servos and mechanisms inside of him? It was with a shiver of revulsion that Jack tried to will the image away, and to his relief it did go away.

It had been a traumatic day. And now that the smothering influence of the Borg Queen was gone, his mind was free to gape in horror at what had been done to him - it just hadn’t had much time to take it all in yet. The mutilated, half-cannibalized faces of the drones who’d been tasked with the first phase of his secondary assimilation would haunt his nightmares for a long time.

“Well, Beverly?” Picard asked concernedly, looking to her. As he moved, Jack’s ocular overlay saw fit to give him a complete rundown of the alloys that made up his fanciful Admiral’s combadge.

“Well, it’s not good, I’ll say that. It never is, with the Borg,” Beverly said wryly, making a face. “But I suppose it’s better than it could have been. There’s a lot that’s typical of Borg that they don’t seem to have gotten around to, I don’t even want to speculate what was meant to go there,” she told them, pointing to the socket on Jack’s right pectoral. Some pulmonary junction meant to facilitate another future implant that would have allowed him to function in a vacuum, Jack believed. “The cortical array is going to be a nightmare to remove, I’m afraid,” his Mum told them, this time pointing to the mass of tubules and wires implanted into the base attached to the right of his skull. “It makes sense that the Borg would have designed your complement for the purpose of amplifying your transmissions before all else, everything else is either standard or missing. Which, don’t worry son, I’m already thinking of ways to get that particular segment out of your DNA, and out of the DNA of everyone in Starfleet who was affected,” she assured him, and he nodded gratefully. Picard beamed at her affectionately.

“Trust me Jack, your mother knows all about unplugging all of this,” Picard agreed. “She’ll have it out of you in no time.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say no time. Locutus pre-dated some things, the spinal clamps for one. Those aren’t coming out any time soon, not if you want to be walking in the next few months,” his mother disagreed. “It’ll be a little while until you’re a hundred percent de-Borg’d, son,” she said apologetically.

“I can live with that,” Jack surmised, before he sniffed amusedly. “Hey, Mum, can I keep this?” he asked jauntily, pointing a gauntleted finger at his eye. His Mum frowned at him bewilderedly and lowered the tricorder as Picard’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You know, on somethings the Borg had some good ideas. It’s good this, it’s like I’ve got the Memory Alpha article for everything I look at and I don’t even need to find a padd for it,” he said with a shrug, trying to ignore the way servos in his biradial clamp whirred with the motion. Picard scoffed.

“You want to keep it?” Picard asked incredulously.

“I can see all sorts of things with it, it’ll come in right handy. Like LaForge’s eyes,” Jack replied, glancing over to Commodore LaForge to verify with his own eyepiece that he was remembering right; indeed, LaForge was the blind one with synthetic eyes that could see all manner of spectra - and the ocular implants Jack had been fitted with were even better. “Wonder if I could run that old Doom game on it. But if you could just fit an off-switch into the thing? It’s gonna be bloody distracting when I try to go to sleep,” he asked wryly, and it was his Mum’s turn to scoff.

“Speaking of, Data, would you mind scanning the wreckage for a preferably intact regeneration alcove? Even if Jack comes to his senses and has us get rid of the damn eye implant it’s going to be a while before it’s all gone, so we’ll be needing one and they’re not exactly in good supply,” Beverly asked, leaning over the tactical console as Data turned about to her with his funny yellow eyes. A partial analysis of Data’s complex positronic android-synthetic hybrid frame flashed up in Jack’s eye. Jack wondered if Data still technically held the Starfleet rank of Lieutenant Commander if he’d been legally dead for twenty-five years, even as he snickered at his Mum’s description of his lunacy at thinking the eye implant at least practical. It was going to be a long recovery, he knew, so Jack thought he might as well make the most of it and get something cool out of it. Namely, the most unobtrusive yet helpful implant of the lot. In a way he was deflecting from the pain, but that little bit of joviality was serious-ish.

“Of course Doctor,” Data replied politely, getting up from the first officer’s chair to go back to his forward station. The LCARS panel chirped and beeped as he tapped buttons in quick succession. “Scanning for one now… I have one. It doesn’t look like it’s got a dead drone in it,” he said wryly, before he tapped another few buttons. “It’s in Cargo Bay One, but I’ve put it in a containment field just in case. I may be twenty years short on news, but I do know that Borg technology isn’t known for its safety,” he told them.

“Thank you Mister Data,” Picard said gratefully. “Will, if you would take the con while Geordi, Beverly, and I head down to Sickbay and get started? Plot a rendezvous with the Titan,” he asked politely, pointing at each of them in turn as he began to step toward the turbolift.

“Sure thing, Jean-Luc. Good luck kid, I know it’s not easy,” Riker replied, parting briefly from Troi. “We’re all glad to have you back with us,” he said with a smile, and Jack nodded back to him. He wasn’t quite sure how to react to it; all his life he’d kept people out, but now that he’d bared so much… he didn’t quite know how to be open without their minds swimming in his own, he had to admit.

“We are. As we said to your father before we came here, you’re as much our family as Kes or Alandra or Sidney. And if you need anyone to talk to about this, my door’s always open to you Jack,” Deanna agreed, smiling warmly at him.

“Thanks. I’ll um, I’ll think about it,” Jack replied, giving them a black-armored thumbs up. Well, he supposed he’d learn how to be open in time. Nevertheless, he slowly and uncomfortably stepped after his father, followed by his Mum and LaForge who’d come up and around from the lower portion of the Bridge.

“Sickbay,” his Mum said as the doors closed behind the four of them, before she reeled back slightly as Jack accidentally got her in the eye with the laser on the side of his head. Could he turn that off? Well, the red dot on the turbolift wall didn’t go away, so he supposed not. “How do you feel?” Beverly asked him softly, reaching up to his cheek. Jack paused.

“Honestly, it fucking hurts,” Jack replied, so quietly he almost hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t wanted to appear weak, but now he was realizing how enormously stupid that was. “Everywhere. The Borg don’t exactly believe in painkillers,” he winced, noting how his father nodded commiseratingly. Every implant was burning agony in his skin and under it, the edge of the armor around his neck was like a vise rooted into him, burrowing in. Nanoprobes still scraped through his veins, filling him with a terrible ache, and so much of him felt rigid, constrained like every joint in his body needed to be cracked. And his head was pounding like a drum, as the turbolift doors whooshed open to reveal a softly lit corridor in the same classic style as the Bridge.

“It’s all right, we’ll put you under while we take as much as we can out son,” Beverly assured him softly as she took the lead in slowly making their way from the turbolift, stepping backwards. Jack nodded thankfully; he’d already been semi-awake to fully experience the implants being put in, he didn’t want to be awake when they were taken out. Jack glanced to the side, at the shiny black panels on the walls that his ocular overlay informed him were old general-purpose monitors for things like directions, only to freeze in horror at his reflection. He blinked, and Võx blinked back at him, the stoic image of the Borg terror. An image not unlike the historical images he’d seen of Locutus of Borg. A zombified, twisted, dissonant reflection that did not, could not, belong to him. Nausea grew in his gut before his father touched his back plates.

“I know,” Picard said simply, and Jack heard thirty years of trauma in his father’s soft-spoken voice. Was it their shared destiny to be forever scarred, violated, by the Borg? There were tears in Jack’s eyes as Picard offered him a hug, and the only reason he didn’t fall into it like a pile of bricks was because he wasn’t entirely sure how much he weighed just then and he didn’t want to hurt his father. But he did lean into the embrace, squeezing his eyes shut over Picard’s shoulder so he could not see the monster the Borg had made of him. Spacedock, and everyone else who had died at the hands of those Võx had controlled, their blood was on Jack’s hands. Because he’d been weak, and submitted to the voice in his head. Become the instrument of the Borg’s vengeance. Jack was weeping, sobbing his guilt into his father’s arms as his mother gently caressed the back of his neck and his hair affectionately, before a tiny pricking feeling barely caught his notice; a hypospray. Mercifully, darkness took him as his mother sedated him.

Jack had never been so glad not to dream. To him, he had succumbed to darkness and only moments later consciousness had seeped back into him like gluggy soup, and his eyes slowly blurred open before he started at an electronic hissing that whirred up seemingly right behind him before something clunked and there was a tiny lurch in his back.

“Wh-er-” Jack groaned, trying to get up and see what it had been only to instantly be dizzy as he tried to sit up too quickly. “Ow…” he winced, squeezing his eyes back shut as that infernal headache bolted back through his brain and his whole body ached.

“Jack. Jack, take it easy,” a familiar voice said right beside him and he jumped, opening his eyes again to blearily see - without any green overlay, notably - the wavy blonde hair and silvery ocular implant of one Commander Seven of Nine, still wearing her red-shouldered Starfleet command uniform. Jack blinked a bit and his eyes finally focused, and he took in where he was. He was, curiously, not aboard the Enterprise D anymore, obviously his Mum had been convinced to at least eventually set her sentimentality aside and transfer him to the Titan’s better equipped sickbay, where he seemed to have a ward to himself. Seven’s hand, laced with the metallic tendons of her remaining Borg implants, took his shoulder gently as Jack sat up, looking around at his bed - well, he knew what they’d done with the regeneration alcove. Some of its components, most obviously the green flickering plasma conductor at its head, had been incorporated into the biobed, no doubt so he’d be more comfortable and yet also regenerate what remaining Borg components he had - and he did still have quite a few. Looking at himself, the exoplating had all been removed, which he was more than glad for. Reticular nodes, the little spidery implants on the skin, still marked a lot of his visible arms and legs, including twin ones on his feet, and probably were there under his hospital gown too. Some of his skin was still gray and mottled around them, but most of it looked like it had returned to a rosier complexion. His right arm almost seemed to match Seven’s - assimilation mechanisms were standard on Borg, though obviously the design had changed a little since Seven of Nine - with dark metallic augmentations embedded over his tendons, wrist, and fingers, which too were capped like Seven’s. “Does it hurt?” Seven asked him.

“Mhmm,” Jack grunted, trying not to nod too much because his head was killing him. It wasn’t the only thing though; for whatever reason, he was actually cognizant of the implants itching now, irritating the skin around them. Seven of Nine took up a hypospray from the bench and held it up, and he squeezed his eyes shut with a smiling grimace in lieu of nodding. With a hiss, Seven administered the analgesic within it, and Jack exhaled slowly as it began to work, dulling his headache. As she did, Jack frowned at her. “When’d you get promoted?” Jack asked, pointing at the four, not three, pips on her neck.

“Yesterday. Captain Shaw’s posthumous recommendation,” Captain Seven replied with a small smile. Catching Jack’s lopsided frown at that, she inhaled. “You’ve been out for three days. Your mother’s taking some well needed rest, she’s been up for the last three days working on you. While they’re gone, I’ve been assigned the job of being your ex-Borg nanny,” Seven told him, with a sardonic lilt to her voice. Jack snorted.

“Borg babysitting? It’ll never catch on,” Jack chuckled, and Seven shook her head amusedly. Jack frowned and raised his plated hand to his face, specifically around his right eye; surprisingly, he found that he still had the base of the ocular implant around his eye, a little like Seven’s but surrounding a bit more of the circumference of his eye and heading up his nose, so why did he not have the overlay? Thankfully, there was no annoying laser rangefinder on his head anymore, there wasn’t a red dot on his hand.

“The uh, robot installed the off-switch you asked for,” Seven told him helpfully. “Just on your temple, there,” she added, demonstrating on her own face. Jack pressed that point on the implant, finding a tiny button that hadn’t been there before, and the green overlay booted back up with a slight twinge of pain in his eye. Nodding, he turned it back off again, and again his eye twinged as it vanished.

“Brilliant, thanks Data,” Jack muttered. “I allowed to get up?” he asked Seven, though he of course had no intention of following a rule not to. Seven nodded.

“Yeah. Here, let me help you,” she replied, holding his arm and hauling him to his feet. Despite his silly desire to do it independently, it was probably a good thing Seven of Nine was helping; his legs were shaky and weak, and he realized just then that it was probably because he hadn’t eaten anything in three, nearly four, days, and the Borg implants responsible for taking over his metabolism had probably been taken out. The cold floor of the Titan’s sickbay chilled his toes, but he welcomed that touch as he shook and steadied himself on the ex-Borg Captain. “Good?” she asked.

“Yeah, better,” Jack replied hoarsely, looking around the sickbay ward. On a far bench were what appeared to be a number of the implants that had been removed from him as well as the exoplating unceremoniously dumped into a container, and on the bedside table was a little square mirror, so he shakily stepped over to it and picked it up. He’d have to get used to his altered reflection, he knew; reflective surfaces weren’t exactly rare, he couldn’t hide from it. Thankfully, as he raised the mirror, he did not see Võx, no. It was still disturbing, but at least it was a reflection that could belong to him. The gray skin had retreated to only be around the very edges of the base metallic ocular implant that partially circumnavigated his eye, and much of the assembly on the side of his head was gone. His hair was a little bit ruined, having been cut away in places, but the face in the mirror was Jack Crusher again. Just… a little wounded. Though, not all of the cranial implants were gone - there was still a lot of black metal behind his right ear. He frowned and touched it.

“We couldn’t remove the entire cranial assembly,” Seven explained. “Firstly, you asked to keep the eyepiece which means keeping the cortical array and the spinal clamps, because those are what the regeneration alcove we built into your bed links to, and secondly… your father explained to us the Borg’s purpose for you. Your cranial array was specially designed, it’s almost more akin to what a Borg Queen has,” she told him, and he listened dutifully. “We could take away most of it, but not all of it. In a way, you’re like a micro-Collective all to yourself. I’d say it saved your life,” Seven said, and Jack turned to her curiously. “Most Borg don’t just get to decide to leave,” she pointed out.

“Right,” Jack muttered, nodding. He couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for others, who had had to be excised from the Collective by force. And those Võx had assimilated, Jack had sort of just shoved them out a little unceremoniously. To be fair, he’d been in a hurry. “If I’d’a stayed in there much longer… might have lost myself,” he breathed, trying not to think about it too much. Seven didn’t reply, she just silently nodded understandingly. Jack took a deep breath, then looked a bit more at his reflection. He grimaced, touching the ocular implant again. “Am I never gonna get that eyebrow back?” he asked petulantly. Seven laughed.

“Welcome to the club, kid,” Seven chuckled. “I was able to neutralize your nanoprobes, so you know. Some of them are locked into a limited maintenance mode, we can’t get rid of all of them, and the rest… well, let’s just say I don’t envy you your next visit to the head,” she said wryly.

“What?” Jack asked worriedly, before he groaned.

“Easiest way to get rid of them all,” Seven shrugged. “Don’t ask me, I’m a Captain not a doctor; Raffi’s in command for the moment. Hungry?” she asked him and he nodded eagerly.

“Starving. Don’t think that regeneration bed does much for that,” Jack replied, and Seven shook her head.

“No, it doesn’t. I remember being pretty pissed off about that when I first started having to eat,” Seven of Nine said amusedly. “Here, put that on and we’ll go get you something to eat. I’m sure your father’s chomping at the bit to see you, and your Mom will be too once she wakes up,” she said, handing Jack his clothes off the bench.

One Year Later

“Jack! Jack Edward Crusher-Picard if you aren’t ready to go I swear to God!” the voice of his Mum called impatiently down the hall. Jack snorted to himself. Well, this was going to go well. Beverly Crusher, dressed in her best formalwear, appeared at his door, eyes blazing. “You are not even dressed. Come on, chop chop! Or do you want to be late to your own graduation?!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together to startle him into retracting his arm tubules from the padd in his hand, and he hurriedly turned off his eyepiece like a scolded child.

“We’ve got plenty of time!” Jack protested.

“Get. Dressed,” his mother insisted, shaking her head. “And would you stop doing that? Sticking those damn tubules in every padd in the house, you’re starting to wear holes in them! Don’t even know why you want to,” she huffed, pointing at the padd in the his hand.

“‘Cos I can have like fifty tabs open at once!” Jack laughed, even as he got up off the regeneration alcove-fitted bed and tossed the padd onto his desk. “Counselor Troi says it’s good that I can recontextualize and embrace what remains of a highly traumatic event in my life,” he added smugly, quoting the good counselor, and his Mum just scoffed at that.

“Is that what you call surfing the extranet all night when you were supposed to be studying for your exams?” Beverly asked him sardonically.

“Well-”

“Get ready to go, for crying out loud,” his Mum told him, before she went back down the hall muttering. Jack snickered to himself and closed his door to get dressed, though he briefly reconnected to the padd to apologize to Sidney for cutting their conversation short and tell her he’d see her later, and then closed the other tabs he’d had open, pausing only to watch the batting team of the cricket game he’d been watching bat a six before he turned his eyepiece off again - the Titan was in dock, so he and Sidney, whom he’d been tentatively seeing since the whole incident, had gone on a couple dates, much to the disapproval of Commodore LaForge, had some drinks together, and then she had promised to attend his graduation from Starfleet Academy. He’d been placed in an accelerated program due to his extensive prior experience - and thankfully pardoned for the pile of petty crimes he’d committed in the name of his and his mother’s medical work - but he’d spent the last year attending the school, and it was part of why he now lived not aboard the S.S. Eleos XII or any replacement for her, but in a very nice penthouse apartment afforded to his mother as an Admiral in Starfleet in San Francisco. His father didn’t live with them, the romance that had once blossomed between Jean-Luc and Beverly was one they both agreed was best left in the realms of bittersweet memory so as to not sour it further, but they were still fond of each other and Picard visited often. Jack thought his father’s Romulan partner Laris was quite a cool woman. Maybe one day, he supposed, he’d get a second half-brother, this one half-Romulan, one he’d actually be able to get to know for once.

Starfleet Academy hadn’t been half bad either; it had been a little awkward at first, since he was the person who’d remotely assimilated half his classmates a year ago, and boy had the guilt kicked him for months, but with time and work and a lot of counseling they’d moved past that and he’d made some quite good friends. But that day he supposed it was time for him to focus on graduation, so he reluctantly set aside his distractions and got dressed in his formal uniform, brushed his teeth and shaved, and applied a generous glob of dermal cream about his implants, particularly the assimilation manifold that ran along his whole right arm. The edges of the things itched a lot and tended to scab when he scratched them, and there were a few stubborn spots that had eventually scarred. Finally, he combed his hair tidily over what remained of the cranial implant that had thankfully been mostly excised since the initial round of surgeries, and smiled at his reflection. The implants weren’t quite so obtrusive anymore, and he’d come to appreciate the one around his eye which he’d actually painted with hypoallergenic silver plating to make it look a bit less ugly and more like Seven’s. The mottling of his skin was gone, his hair had grown back and the bright young man that looked back at him was exactly that; a young man, and human. Satisfied, he nodded at himself. By day’s end, there’d be a pip on his collar.

“There. Better?” Jack asked his Mum as he stepped into the living room.

“Much better,” Beverly said warmly, beaming at him. “All right then, let’s be off,” she said, before they walked arm in arm down to the transporter arch and beamed to the Academy, where Jack winced as the sun struck his eyes. Shame the implant didn’t come with a sunglasses function, the Borg really needed to learn a thing or two about beach holidays. But they both smiled gladly at the sight of who was waiting for them quietly under a tree, leaning on the wall trying not to attract too much attention despite wearing a suit; Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, who got up with a wide smile and walked across the concourse to them. “Jean-Luc,” Beverly said, offering him a hug.

“Beverly,” Jean-Luc replied, embracing her and kissing her cheeks politely. “Good to see you, and of course.. big day son,” he told them both, as he moved to Jack and hugged him too with a proud wrinkly old man smile.

“Yeah,” Jack said, smiling back at him. “But I reckon you’re feeling pretty foolish now for giving that whole the last Picard speech last year,” he snickered, having been sent the video by Sidney a few weeks before. Picard scoffed ruefully, closing his eyes and hanging his head. All that pontification about the decorated Picard line ending with Jean-Luc, and a year later the whole thing was ruined.

“In my defense, I was not aware that you existed at the time,” Picard grumbled softly, not without a glance at Beverly, who made an apologetic face. “But I have never been prouder to be wrong, Jack. The legacy you write will no doubt prove you far more than worthy of all those Picards who came before you,” he said softly, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “And part of the reason I am quite definitely not giving a speech this year is because I doubt I could live last year down if I spoke at the graduation of my own mysteriously apparated son,” he chuckled, and Jack smirked as he patted his father’s shoulder with his partially-encased hand. “Shall we?” the old man said, and with that the three of them joined the throngs of students and their families gathering in the great auditorium for the graduation of the class of 2402.

Jack was just glad that he wasn’t the first young ex-Borg cadet to graduate from the Academy, so that the speaker couldn’t have called him up as the first, as if it were some honor - though he suspected that even if he hadn’t been second to the late Icheb, they wouldn’t have wanted to point him out only a year after such a pivotal Borg threat, using Jack himself as its tool, had taken so many lives, destroyed so much. It weighed on him even then a year later, made him wonder if he even deserved the place he took at Starfleet Academy. The angry tirade of the fallen Captain Shaw, whose very life Jack - no, Jack urged himself to remember, Võx, not him - had taken, against his father, against what the Borg had made of Jean-Luc Picard, the only Borg so deadly they gave him a goddamn name! rambled through his mind as he only half listened to some Admiral whose name he hadn’t caught talk about the values of Starfleet. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought of how he was certain that Captain Shaw wouldn’t have forgiven him.

A glint of light caught his eye, and he looked up at the gallery from which it had come - and he recognized its source; it had reflected off of the eyepiece of Seven of Nine, who sat not looking at the speaker, but at him. She wasn’t the only one. Sidney sat there, newly a Lieutenant and beaming down at him, Picard and his Mum were with them, along with Musiker and the Romulan Elnor, Troi, and Riker, and their daughter Kestra, a few years from graduating herself, had come along too. And Seven of Nine was smiling just as proudly as his parents were at him. Jack smiled back up at them. If the old Enterprise senior staff were a big family, then Seven was like a cousin to that family, a big cousin who’d been there for Jack whenever she could be all year. Jack smiled back up at them, remembering what they themselves had told him in their own ways; that he deserved to be here. That he had been manipulated and used, and that what the Borg had engineered him to be did not define him.

The instant he had stepped up and received his commission as Ensign Jack Crusher-Picard and the silver pip had been pinned to his neckline had been decidedly more tense than that of his classmates, but it had been those friends whom he had made that had begun the applause that had rung out through the auditorium just as it had for everyone before him, applause echoed loudest by the gallery of his family and Sidney and Seven. Perhaps there were those who would see him as dangerous always, but he was not alone.

Of course, the better bit of the day was the dozens and dozens of parties that sprang up all over San Francisco afterward, and Jack found himself partying in a cocktail bar ringing with pop music alongside Sidney, a little tipsy as he and his friends laughed away the evening as new ensigns of Starfleet.

“Ayyyyyy!” Jack cried as his Andorian buddy Tr’ven won the beer pong game. “Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink!” he chanted along with his friends as the loser, a Bajoran by the name of Jarian Dai groaned and reluctantly picked up the red cup. Bzz bzz. In Jack’s pocket, his miniature padd buzzed with a text notification. Huffing, Jack got out the little glass device, expecting it to be another text from his Mum asking when he’d be home, but he was curiously surprised to see the text hadn’t come from his Mum. No, it had come from Seven of Nine, simply abbreviated to 7/9 for her display name.

7/9: Check your Cadet account emails.

Jack frowned. That was a bit out of the blue, but he supposed not without plausible cause; some of the cadets, like Dai, had received their assignments - he was going to the U.S.S. Vanguard - so maybe that was what she meant. Putting the padd in his left hand, Jack turned on his eyepiece and then focused on his arm to shoot the two evil little tendrils that were the interfacing assimilation tubules into it.

“Oooh he’s getting the tubules out!” Leannia, an unjoined Trill, cajoled excitedly. She was drunker than he was, and Jack scoffed.

“Oh shut up Leannia,” Sidney chuckled, shaking her head as she smiled at him.

“I’m just checking my emails, it’s not that cool. Screen on this thing’s tiny,” Jack replied, shaking his head. Leannia laughed gleefully and took another long sip of whatever colorful cocktail she had, some disgusting thing with Denevian Mead in it, while Jack flipped out his emails into his peripheral vision with a thought. And indeed, among the unreads, was one from Starfleet Command, with the subject line Starship Assignment - Jack Crusher-Picard. “It’s my assignment,” he said softly, but clearly not softly enough, as half his friends heard and gasped.

“Oh! Tell us tell us!” Dai called, downing the red cup of booze he’d had to drink from the pong. “Let’s hear it Crusher!”

“Gimme a bloody second,” Jack laughed, opening the email in another tab to read it. Most of it was the usual official stuff, before his eyes widened incredulously as he read his assignment.

Starship: U.S.S. Enterprise - NCC-1701-G

Commanding Officer: Captain Seven of Nine

“Holy cow,” Jack muttered.

“Whizzit?” Dai asked, his voice so slurred it came out in one word.

“Enterprise G,” Jack replied, retracting his tubules and turning off his eyepiece as he blinked. Instantly, cheers erupted around him from his classmates. Sidney erupted, yelling with gladness that they were both to be serving together and kissing him.

“AYYYY! Bartender! Another round for the Enterprising xB!” Tr’ven yelled eagerly as his antennae shot up, clapping Jack’s shoulder triumphantly. “Hahahaa!” Jack couldn’t help but laugh and celebrate with them, beaming as the group congratulated him. Despite all the pain, despite the violations he had been through, Jack was not alone. It was not such a bad thing at all, to suffer the mortifying ordeal of being known.

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