InsaneJournal

Lucifer had done his best to refrain from drinking, especially because the last thing he really needed was a drunk, panicking Tony. But now they were going on three days and the idea of not taking advantage of the bar was becoming more and more ridiculous.

Besides, Seven had shown up, so they had strength in numbers.

“Right,” he announced cheerfully. “I need whiskey. You two?” He fully expected Tony to say yes, and Seven to decline, though he was open to surprises.

True to her nature, Seven declined the offer. “No, thank you.”

Inebriation was not the answer. While she understood that it provided a temporary sense of comfort and relief, one had to continue to ingest alcohol in order to maintain that state of lowered awareness. And considering how much she was already feeling the strain on her systems from lack of regeneration, engaging in that activity would inhibit her cognition even more than it already was.

"I am like- yes, yes, alcohol, thank you. Yes." Tony replied, from where he'd bunkered down in the corner. His back was to the windows, so he didn't have to look at Space and the fact that they were still stuck adrift in it. The past two days had him looking a little worse for wear, but he had no doubt it would all be worse if he'd been stuck alone, or somewhere else.

If they made it out of this he was gonna have to get Lucifer something super nice. "Worker Bee doesn't like to lose control of her senses. Or her processes. Or whatever."

Lucifer glanced over at Tony, then back at Seven. “You already are, aren’t you?” he asked her quietly, looking genuinely concerned. “Does sleep work at all? And in the absence of alcohol or synthohol or whatever you call it,” Lucifer started, “Want anything else to drink? Coffee? Water? A latte? There’s juice…”

He got up and walked behind the bar, first pouring two whiskeys. He figured if he didn’t let Tony drink soon, the man would revolt. And maybe with someone else here he’d have something new to focus on rather than the potential of freezing to death in space. That would be more pleasant for everyone involved.
He waited at the bar to see if Sev wanted anything, but nodded at Tony and held up his glass.

The drone in question wasn’t buzzing with near as much energy as usual — in fact, as Lucifer had more or less accurately surmised, her energy levels were depleting. Sufficiently so. Enough to make her wobbly upon standing (which she was avoiding, though sitting in general was an oddity for her), dizzy, and slightly disoriented. If asked to complete a task at this moment, she would have to concentrate hard on performing it and would do so inadequately at best.

“No,” she said, looking down at the heavily augmented hand in her lap. “I do not sleep. My brain is incapable of inducing restfulness.”

Unfortunately, she simply wasn’t human enough. Her biological systems had reasserted themselves, yes, but portions of her daily life would likely forever remain Borg. Especially in regards to sleep versus regeneration.

“I will take coffee,” Seven finally settled upon. “Perhaps that will allow me to regain some composure.”

"Hmm." Tony raised his eyebrows at that interchange, then got up from where he was camped out and came down to the bar to get his glass. While he was doing so, he gave Seven a once-over, and then a twice-over, and frowned. "How long has it been since you plugged in? Did you get a chance before we all got stranded?"

He took his glass in his hand and then glanced over at his new BFF, the espresso machine. "Espresso might give you an energy jolt but it's gonna play hell with your body chemistry. Juice might be a better alternative. Natural sugars and stuff. Better source and easier to process."

“Juice then,” she said, not in the proper frame of mind to argue.

The humans aboard her ship (the captain, namely) might survive in a weakened state off the energy coffee gave them, but Tony had a point: her systems were unique, and requiring them to process something that wasn’t natural may have unforeseen consequences.

“Approximately eighty-four hours,” was her belated answer. She had to pause to calculate the time in her head, and was frustrated to find that she could not do so down to the exact nanosecond. That was troubling. “It has been too long since I last regenerated. I am beginning to malfunction.”

Tony wasn't remotely as fast as a Borg drone when it came to Math. He knew he was outclassed there. But those kinds of mental calculations were exactly the ones he could do in no time flat, even after being awake 72 hours straight. So he definitely looked concerned as Lucifer got out the juice and poured Seven a glass.

"Okay, Worker Bee... that definitely took too long. You could have done that calculation in less than a nanosecond before. Yup. Eighty-four hours. You were working too hard again, weren't you?"

He really needed to work on that with her. Not that he could blame her. She didn't sleep, and when HE couldn't sleep he liked to keep busy himself. "What can we do to fix this I wonder..."

Seven looked up, fixing Tony with a look of pure, unfiltered ire. (Rare for her.) “I was not intending to be trapped for three days when I set my regeneration cycle,” she snapped. “I would have spent time in my alcove beforehand if I had any way of predicting this event.”

Pushing back a stray lock of blonde hair that had fallen free of its pins, the ex-drone added, “The Borg are many things. Precognitives, we are not. Nor is there anything in this beverage facility that I can syphon energy from without further damaging myself.”

“To be fair,” Lucifer said, sitting back down, “I don’t think Tony realizes it’s been three days… Nor has he slept properly. So I’m sure he didn’t mean too much by that.” He glanced at his friend and then took a sip of whiskey, straight from the bottle.

Seven’s arrival gave the other man something new to focus on, which was good, but not if he ended up pissing her off. Turning his attention back to Sev, he asked, “Anything either of us can do?”

Tony had definitely been about ready to yell back, but Lucifer's words made him blink a few times. He opened his mouth, and then shut it, and when he finally opened it again it was to meekly say, "I'm just concerned about you, relax about it."

The other half of his brain was still working on the problem, though he didn't have as much information to work with as she did. So he waited for her response to Lucifer, and worked on his alcohol. Three days. Jesus H Christ on a motorcycle.

“Forced confinement makes the passage of time difficult to discern,” was her contribution to that, lacking any additional commentary about the effect the starfield had on the human psyche, causing day to bleed into night. The thought was there, lodged somewhere in her cortical array, but she couldn’t quite get it from the node to her vocal chords.

Times like these, she missed the effortless communication of the hive mind.

“Not presently,” she told them, “but I will try the juice.”

Slowly, she sipped it — awkwardly, like someone entirely unaccustomed to drinking from a cup in this manner. (Or drinking from a cup and ingesting liquids at all.) Swallowing wasn’t something she could do in tandem with the act, and she had to pause between mouthfuls to force the liquid down.

The good news as Lucifer saw it was that Seven no longer appeared pissed at Tony. The bad news was that watching her try to drink her juice was somewhat akin to watching a toddler. It was a shame there were no sippy cups at the bar, and fortunate that she couldn’t read his mind.

He didn’t think so at least. He certainly hoped not.

“Alright,” he announced. “I have a plan.” He hoped he sounded more optimistic about this than he felt. “Seven, you need to rest but you need to keep your mind occupied or something along those lines?” He had no idea really, which was a failing in his plan. “And Tony, you’re a genius who knows a lot about all sorts of things. So. You ramble onto Seven about all that scientific-y stuff only the two of you will understand and Seven, you try and let the rest of yourself relax even if your mind won’t properly shut down.”

And he’d drink the whiskey because he was feeling otherwise rather useless in this situation.

"Well that beats the hell out of my idea, which was to try and take off some of the panels around here and maybe we could jerry rig something, but we really can't." Tony mumbled, finishing off his whiskey. He was definitely more worried, now.

"I mean I can talk science at you, sure. You can sit there and seethe about how incorrect my theories are and how I've got fallacious conclusions to things because I'm still learning modern stuff. How about I talk about science from where I'm from instead? Yeah, that's sounding better." He said, while rubbing his hand against his face.

"So I met this girl named Maya in 1999 who was working on this project. It essentially used chemistry and nanotech to rewrite our genomes, unlocking potential like the ability to heal back from permanent injury. Problem was, the process also raised the metabolic rate of anything it came in contact with, so when my bodyguard went and tore some leaves off of her test plant, it went volatile while it was healing and blew up in her hotel room." He paused for a moment, trying to decide if this story needed more liquor, or more coffee, or both.

Seven refrained from informing them that if her cortical node reached a point where it required a state of dormancy to continue cybernetic functions, there would be nothing she could do in order to prevent herself from shutting down — like a computer screen that went dark when entering sleep or hibernation mode. It was a safety mechanism, designed to protect drones that were stranded or left behind on missions so they would be able to better conserve energy until a cube returned for them.

She did not like to think back upon the time she and other drones in her subunit were on that one planet, out of contact with the Collective. It was unpleasant and upsetting for a number of reasons. Many she wasn’t proud of.

“I cut myself once, after joining Voyager,” she found herself saying. “I bled. It was… a disturbing sight. I didn’t know what to make of it. Surely I’ve bled before, but that was— That was a long time ago, when I was someone else.”

As a drone, she would have healed instantaneously, but the wound had remained agape, the blood continuing to flow.

“Why do you think it destabilized so rapidly?”

“I got shot once,” Lucifer said, interrupting Tony’s reply to Seven’s question to talk about his favorite subject, himself. But Sev had brought up a memory. “I’m generally immortal unless I’m around other celestial beings as it were, or… well, demons. And I tried to prove that to a detective friend of mine, and I had her shoot me. And then I bled. And it hurt. Turns out I wasn’t immortal around her, but she’s not here so all good. Anyway, have I already told you both that story? If so I apologize, I just remember finding it fascinating at the time.”

Tony had been about to answer Seven's question when Lucifer interjected with the shooting thing, and then he was doing a lot of blinking. His mouth was still hanging open, and he stared at Lucifer for a few seconds before shaking his head. "Yeah. Sure. I mean, it does. So does getting blown up, actually. And even mortals can think they're untouchable. I thought I was damn near invincible until I woke up in a tent in Afghanistan with a car battery strapped to my chest."

Which was him swinging back around to him, though this was as likely to be as distracting as babbling on about science was. He hoped. He finished off his glass of liquor, and set it down on the counter.

"But I think it destabilized so rapidly because she couldn't find a way to counteract the metabolic effects. Human body's capable of putting out a lot of energy. These few guys, the ones that the process was successful on? They were seriously on fire from within whenever they wanted to be. Enough to physically melt the titanium alloy I make my suits out of. And their core temps were running hotter, hot enough to target them specifically. So when I stabilized Pepper, that's the part of the chemical equation I started with."

Seven used to be invincible, or as close to it as someone not an omnipotent cosmic entity could become. There used to be a strong chance she’d exist for centuries, and although her recollections and time as a drone would exist infinitely within the hive mind, the physical assurance was no longer there. She’d likely live much, much longer than a normal human would, but not forever. And certainly not as long as she would have if her body weren’t as imperfect as it was now.

“And you believe you can use this equation to assist me with the drain on my systems?”

“Right, I’ll leave you two to it,” Lucifer said, not understanding anything of what was being said and not really caring, as long as the two of them kept each other busy. He took the bottle of whiskey with him over to the piano and started playing, hoping the damn ship would be fixed soon.

"Well, uh..." Tony blinked his eyes a few times, mock saluting Lucifer as he went off to play the piano, and deciding he was too far gone to really mess with the espresso machine himself. Instead, he took his own advice and poured himself a glass of juice.

"I was actually just rambling science at you but if we combined the equation with what your nanoprobes can already do, we might be able to think up a way to have your probes regenerate you without even hooking up to something. Huh." He wished he had a white board, now. There were some he'd replicated and put up in his quarters, but those were far away and out of reach.

His mind was already thinking about possible applications, though, awhir with science and technology. Which was probably exactly what Lucifer was hoping for.

Plausible, but unfortunately that was all her weary mind could come up with at the moment. This was likely the closest she was capable of coming to feeling tired. The urge to slip into a state of dormancy was practically overwhelming.

With some effort, Seven scooted her chair out and stood, having to brace herself on the table with both palms in order to avoid tipping over to one side. The deck felt as if her slanted, her internal stabilizers beginning to malfunction.

“Could you make the attempt with what’s available in this room?”

Tony looked around at what was available in the room, taking a mental stock of all of the materials and chemicals available, even if they were inside other machines in the area. They could scavenge up quite a bit of stuff in the Lounge.

But he shook his head, "I've only got part of the equation memorized, myself. I'd need time to formulate one, and pharmaceutical equipment, precision tools, a workshop, and probably a couple of your nanoprobes and samples of biological tissue. For now I think... I think I don't know what to do. We could modify a power source but none of the ones here are gonna give you enough wattage to plug in with."

Engineers were the people you called when situations like this came up, but he felt lost. He hated feeling helpless. More than anything, he hated knowing there were answers to the problem if he just had the right tools.

There were a dozen solutions to this problem, but none of them were viable at the moment — her own, or Tony Stark’s. Were her energy levels a bit more up to par, she could make her way through the Jeffries tube system to another section of the ship. But that wasn’t something she wanted risk right now, as the prospect of shutting down in a maintenance tunnel, alone and out of rescue’s reach, was an unpleasant one.

“I am unaccustomed to feeling helpless,” Seven said after a moment. “I am Borg, I should not be at a loss for a proper solution.”

"No one's accustomed to being helpless, Bee." Tony replied, a little more gently than usual. Normally he wasn't the type to open up, but this was a generally safe area. He'd already freaked out on Lucifer a bunch of times and Seven wasn't likely to share his secrets with anyone, ever. "I'm an engineer. Solving problems like this with a toothpick and some spare parts is, like. What I went to college for. But everything I'd need to fix this is somewhere else."

Then he got an idea. Lucifer was playing piano, it was a pretty peaceful scene if you didn't count the panic going on everyone else's minds. Tony came back from around the bar, moved one of the stools, and parked himself on the floor right in front of it. Then he motioned towards the floor. "You're gonna shut down sooner rather than later. That's a scary thing. Come here and lay or sit by me. I'll keep you safe, Sauron will play you nice tunes to zone out to."

Protest was something she would have done under any other circumstance, but she was unwillingly reminded of how quiet it had been after she was robbed of the hive mind’s song. It had been absolutely terrifying in those first moments, to sit on the other side of that force field with no other thoughts or presences but her own.

At least here, she had both Tony and Lucifer to keep her company.

“You will need to place me in my alcove immediately, as soon as the ship’s primary systems come back online,” she told the engineer, passing by a table with a discarded PADD that she could leave her encryption codes on for him. (Borg encryption codes that she would not have trusted in anyone else’s hands, and certainly not any Starfleet officer belonging to this century.)

Awkwardly, she lowered herself to the ground, crouching and then shifting to sit with her legs curled to one side.

“I appreciate your assistance. I do not enjoy silence.” Or being left alone, contrary to popular assumption.

Lucifer could play the piano for days, so there was nothing in this plan that phased him. Instead, he listened as Tony focused on helping Seven, happy that she was serving as a viable distraction. At least, if this bloody red alert didn’t last much longer.

"I'll get you right back where you belong, the second this Red Alert lifts. Promise. Scout's Honor." Tony gave Seven a salute, eyeing the PADD she'd left and making note of it. "And I'll erase that PADD when I'm done."

He patted her shoulder, then, and cracked a yawn. "We've got you, Bee. No worries."