Work Text:
“What is it?”
“Ale,” Geordi says, pressing the bottle into his hands. “Try it. You might like it. Might hate it. If you hate it, I’ll drink the rest of it.” He brings his own bottle to his lips and takes a pull. Hugh looks down at the bottle in his hands. He raises it to his mouth, sniffs it, and then cautiously takes a sip.
“Hm,” Hugh says, examining the label on the bottle as he swallows. “I think I like it.”
Geordi beams at him. The setting sun reflects in his bionic eyes, an orange glow settling on his silvery irises and on the pallor of Hugh’s skin. “Hair’s starting to come in there,” Geordi comments, raising a hand to rub the stubble on Hugh’s scalp. “When my mom was stationed at the Artemis , their tactical officer had to get some… invasive brain surgery, or something… anyway, they had to shave her head to do it. So in solidarity my mom shaved her head, too.” He shakes his head fondly. “I just remember her coming home bald… my sister screamed .”
Hugh takes another sip of his ale. “Are you… suggesting you would do the same for me? Shave your head?”
“Yeah, if you want,” Geordi says. “It’s just hair. It grows back. Besides— best captain I ever served under was a bald man.”
Hugh grins. “That’s true.” He gazes out at the rolling hills before them. Everything looks so different through his new cybernetic eye— it’s as if he is seeing less, but also more. “No, you don’t have to do that,” he tells Geordi. “My hair will grow in soon enough.”
“Alright.”
“And your hair looks so good,” Hugh points out, causing Geordi to duck his head in mild embarrassment.
“Be gray soon enough,” he comments.
The passage of time— an interesting concept. Hugh is regaining his humanity while Geordi’s youth begins to slip away from him. The idea that people age and continue their lives— that growing old does not mean becoming obsolete. The thought of dying after a long life, a life truly lived— it is still a kind of novelty.
“I heard about Data,” Hugh says.
Geordi’s posture immediately changes. His shoulders slump; his easy smile falls. “You did, huh?”
“I try to keep tabs on Romulan and Federation news,” Hugh explains. “Shinzon’s attack was… a little of both.”
“Right.” A shudder runs through Geordi despite the warmth of the evening. “I, um. I kind of try not to think about Data.”
“I’m sorry I brought him up.”
“No, it’s…” Geordi sighs. “I try not to think about him, but I know I should , you know? He deserves to be remembered.”
Hugh nods. “He was your friend.”
The grief threatens to choke Geordi. He drinks his drink. “I wish you’d gotten to know him better,” he tells Hugh. “You know, I mean, aside from…”
“Watching him join his brother in trying to abuse and control my people?” Hugh says wryly. “It’s okay, Geordi. I always knew that wasn’t who Data really was. I mean…” He tenses, and Geordi knows he’s thinking of the Collective, listening to old, dead echoes in his mind. “I’ve done things… terrible things… things I did because I wasn’t in control. I would never hold it against somebody else.”
“You saved his life,” Geordi says, remembering Picard’s recounting of that terrible day, how Hugh had lunged at Lore to prevent him from firing on Data. “You hardly knew him… you could have died… but you did it anyway.”
“I was confused, and I didn’t know as much then as I do now,” Hugh admits. “But I understood enough to know there are things worth dying for.”
“Data knew that, too.” Sometimes Geordi wishes he hadn’t. Sometimes he wishes Data had been naive and inexperienced and unimaginative, sometimes he wishes Data had chosen to remain on the Enterprise- E, safe and sound.
But that just wasn’t him. And Data never wavered from his guiding principle, ripped from the pages of the bard— “to thine own self be true.”
“He… he was nearly assimilated, once,” Geordi recalls suddenly. “Did you know that?”
“I did not,” Hugh says. “My connection to the collective has… dimmed. Like background noise.”
“It was in the past. I mean, way, way in the past, before any of us were born,” Geordi says. “We had followed the Borg through a time rift… it’s, uh, it’s a long story. But Data was captured by the queen.”
Hugh shudders. “She tried to assimilate him? But… he was synthetic.”
“The queen found a creative solution,” Geordi says bitterly. “She removed his bioplast, grafted human skin to his arm and face.”
Hugh’s mismatched eyes, one organic, one cybernetic, gaze into nothing. Reliving old wounds, maybe. “It must have been awful,” he says.
Geordi nods. “I think… I think he tried to cover up how much it affected him,” he says. “After we got back… he was still himself , of course, but he was never the same. He chose to go without his emotion chip a lot more often.”
Hugh seems to understand. “The assimilation process goes much deeper than the skin,” he says. “I’ll admit, there are times… when I think it might have been nice to be able to turn my emotions off.”
Geordi reaches out and places a hand on top of Hugh’s hand. “Your emotions are part of what makes you an individual.”
“Oh, I know that,” Hugh assures him. “But that doesn’t stop them from… hurting, from time to time.”
“I know,” Geordi says, but he doesn’t, not exactly. Hugh and Data— and Picard, and countless others— went through an invasive, horrifying ordeal that he hasn’t experienced. If he’s lucky, it’s something he’ll never understand.
“But,” Hugh says, turning his hand over so he can lace his fingers with Geordi’s, “that’s why we have friends. People who make us feel better, who are with us when we’re lonely.”
Geordi smiles hearing his own words from so long ago said back to him. “That’s right,” he agrees. “... I’m really glad we’re friends, Hugh.”
The sun sinks lower, glinting off the metal on Hugh’s forehead and the cerulean-silver of Geordi’s eyes. “Me too,” Hugh says.