"Demon" really seemed to call for some sort of response, though it was
fluffy and insignificant and made no sense - since when do mimetic substances
inherit the memories of the DNA they copy? I am sure there are going to be
lots of "...and the crew lived happily ever after" stories emerging out of
this episode, and I look forward to reading them. But I can't help but feel
that when they agreed to permit this atrocious merger, the entire crew (which
is owned by Paramount, like so much on this planet) must have been suffering
from...

DEMONIC POSSESSION
by YCD

She is always with me now.

She cannot take a breath without my feeling her lungs expand. She cannot lift
her face to the sky without my feeling the warmth. I know now that my link
with Riley and her collective was meant to prepare me for this, this sharing
of self with her and with the rest. And my hundreds of childhood lessons about
how we are a part of the land and the land is a part of us finally make sense.

Harry and Tom said it was exhilarating, but that word doesn't begin to
describe the incredible wonder of life in this place. I walk through the heart
of live volcanoes unscarred. I stand at the center of erupting geysers and
feel only the tumult, then the glorious surge of freedom. There is no hunger,
no exhaustion, no compulsion to keep moving. The other times I have been happy
in my life, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, climbing the mountains of Dorvan,
watching the sun set on New Earth, were only shadows. We are all home. We are
all together.

Annika comes to stand by my side. Ironic that she had to be assimilated by
this world to become fully human. The Borg nanoprobes in her body have been
fully neutralized by the fluid in our veins, part our blood and part the
silver blood of the planet. Hours after our arrival, she announced that she no
longer wished to be called Seven of Nine, because now she is one of
one-hundred-and-forty-six. She was the first of us to shed her clothing,
declaring the uniforms irrelevant. I believe that she misses the Doctor, but
otherwise she has experienced the same joy which the rest of us share.

"Tuvok is conflicted," she tells me. She does not have to say the words: I
already know, both his feelings and her concerns about them. The silver blood
bond allows us to hide nothing. Tuvok has had a hard time accepting the logic
of our situation. Even though I know he feels pleasure, even though I have
shared his experience of wonder at our transformation, he suffers from a
nagging need for a sense of purpose, a direction. Not even Kathryn can
distract him from that.

Of any of us, Kathryn has changed the most. At the moment Voyager lifted off,
she turned to me and said, "I'm not the captain anymore." I had always
expected that she'd suffer from such a loss of identity, but she astonished me
- she started pirouetting across the terrain, dancing part of that piece from
Swan Lake she did for Talent Night, stopping only when she fell into one of
the deuterium pools. When I rushed to her, alarmed, she came up laughing and
pulled me in. "Nothing can hurt us anymore, Chakotay," she added, and I felt
it through my body, coming from her and from the planet, the absolute
conviction.

The first time we made love, with the silver blood in our veins and all around
us shuddering its approval, I could feel the entire crew on the fringes of our
connection. I wondered that I didn't resent that, yet it was how we should
always have been - Kathryn and I have always been sworn to the crew, but so
foolish as to think of them as an impediment rather than a supplement to our
passion. Once it had had a taste of physical gratification, the silver blood
became ravenous to experience it again, and we found ourselves connected
sexually in ways we'd never tried nor even imagined previously - there was no
sensation the new consciousness did not want to experience, no form of
pleasure it did not crave. She accepted that, as she finally accepted me, she
let herself experience flights which she would not even consider on the bridge
or in Da Vinci's studio.

It took B'Elanna a little longer because she was jealous of Tom and Harry. The
two shared a special bond between themselves because they were the first two -
what happened between them on the planet when they were first taken was unlike
anything the rest of us experienced once the silver blood knew sentience. But
the planet put her in touch with her primal fire, the Klingon heat she had
always tried to push aside, and she finally accepted that playing at monogamy
with Tom had only made them both unhappy - neither of them accepts limits
easily. Now they share their pleasure freely among the crew, and themselves,
and we all feel their joy.

If anyone had told me that I would feel vicarious pleasure as Kathryn splashed
in a pool of deuterium with B'Elanna and Vorick, if anyone had told me that I
would share her cries of release as Tuvok moved over her body, if anyone had
ever told me that Neelix has more erogenous zones on the back of his neck than
some species have in their entire bodies and that I would revel in that
knowledge, I would probably have been sick. But everything is changed here. We
are one body, one spirit, we have evolved into something new. There are no
sunrises, no seasons, no distractions or interruptions in our perfect
communion. This is paradise, this demon-planet, and no matter where my double
may travel among the stars, no matter what new experiences he may encounter,
even if he reaches home, I do not envy him.

This is all I am.