Ruby Slippers Are A One-Way Ticket
Sometimes, if you're lucky, the tornado comes at just the right moment. Whether you're stuck on a dusty farmyard out in Kansas or the sterile environment of mid-24th century San Francisco, you dream about the place on the other side of the rainbow.
You dream about it. That's all it is, a dream, a fantasy, a horror story. Something to scare the children with a dark winter's night.
Children you'll never have. Not now.
It's the place where fairytale monsters come from. You've come face to face with them, held one, touched one, tasted one. It's Theseus lost in the Labyrinth, knowing that the Minotaur is lying in wait somewhere, that it's all just a matter of time. That fantasy place, that far-off kingdom that existed once upon a time, was never meant to be someone's reality, your reality.
Somehow on that yellow brick road, you found your courage, your brain, your heart. Your home.
You had company on your travels. Like Dorothy, you couldn't have made it home without them. The Tin Man who's really just a trick of the light and the shadows, the boy with hair like straw you gathered on your parents' antiquated farm. The man with puppy-dog eyes, following faithfully at your heels.
There's no place like home. There's no place like home. Home is where the heart is. Home is not and never was the house in San Francisco that you shared with Mark and the dogs, or your parents' farm back in Iowa, the one you hated because you had to do all the work by hand.
Home is a museum now, just like that older version of yourself told you. You're an exhibit, people come to visit, to poke and to prod, and leave feeling as though they've done something productive with their afternoon. You're left feeling dry and dusty and old.
You meet a man, to your surprise and his. You meet a man even more venerated than yourself and somehow end up in bed together, scratching your nails across his scalp as he drags his fingers through hair you're trying to grow out again. You ask in an unguarded moment, what it was like with the Borg Queen. As soon as the words escape your mouth, you press the palm of your hand there hoping to force them back. You expect him to hit you, to throw you out of the house, but instead he offers you a trade – his story for one of yours. You can guess, without asking, what he wants. So you tell him about Seven, every damn detail. The Borg strength, the metallic taste of her implants as you sucked them into your mouth. His breath is hot on your neck as you mention this, feeling him harden against you. Her thigh between your leg, rubbing your clit insistently. Your fingers tangled in her long blonde hair as you bit at a nipple. The feeling of the spidery metal on her hand as she fucked you relentlessly. He's inside you now, grunting and unbearably turned on. You wonder aloud, as you nuzzle his neck, where the Borg learnt to fuck. He stops abruptly, and the whimper you let out turns to a moan as he traces the contours of your breast and pinches your nipple harshly. He punctuates his words with short, rough thrusts, tethering you on the edge until he's ready for you to come. His skin shimmers with sweat in the late afternoon sunlight, and his eyes are glazed. He's speaking to you, but he sees her and his voice cracks with an emotion not unlike desire as he confesses how she made him beg for it. How he enjoyed begging. It doesn't matter that what came after was ugly, that this is the first time he can speak about the Borg without thinking about the lives lost because of him. He lives in the memory of her whisper in his mind, of his overheated flesh meeting something cool and not quite human. Of becoming more than he is, through her.
He understands the monsters and their pull, why the dark is sometimes safer than the light. He knows how to kill your love for someone little by little until you wake up one day and there's nothing left.
He knows what it's like to only feel alive when you're staring death in the face.
One day, at some official Starfleet ceremony where you both make polite conversation despite having been writhing around together that morning, you both look up at the sky, at the rainbow arching over San Francisco, and somehow resist the urge to click your heels together three times.