[JP] Lieutenants Amelia Semara & Ras El’Heem - The Biggest and Most Perfect Apology Dinner, Part 5
Max
(( Amelia’s Quarters, Room 145, Deck 14, USS Khitomer ))
Amelia, still holding her violin, pointed the bow at Ras, very nearly about to come to the point. Hopefully.
Semara: Right. So now say we wanna make a string quartet. Only I wanna use a bow, and to you it’s just a chin guitar, and I’m a potential horse-murderer. Get it? If I tell you what the thing is, we might end up with nothin’.
El’Heem: So we need another horse-murderer or a few actually because it’s a quartet. Horse genocide?
That almost certainly wasn’t what she was getting at but she was hardly giving him anything to work with. He had half a mind to just tell her to show him. In the way Betazoids do. But he also remembered how sensitive it all was and he wasn’t about to introduce another complication.
Semara: :: Snapping :: Right, exactly! If it were first contact, I might be the latest in a long line of maniacal horse-murderers for all you know, but actually, that’s not the thing at all, and really it’s just the first thing and I just really, really like the violin.
She stared at him, nodding eagerly. For some reason, it felt like he was painfully close to the thing. Just one little shove and he’d be there. She knew this was the right analogy all along! It was almost too obvious now that she thought about it.
El’Heem: Alright. So…if I see a chin guitar, it’s just a chin guitar…to me, right? Because that’s what it is to me. But that’s not all it is. And if I see a bow ::pointing at the bow in her hand:: without context, I invent a history for it. A violent history, at that. And they’re two separate things. But the sound…the sound only exists when both are understood as parts of the same system. ::pausing, his forehead still wrinkled but slightly less now::
Semara: See, but it’s actually worse than that. Suppose I can convince you I ain’t a horse-murderer. Maybe you’re even interested in learnin’ about usin’ a bow. But music lessons take a little while sometimes, and the last thing I want is someone to feel bad about their thing because they just didn’t know about or have the other thing that made it the thing, y’know?
El’Heem: So if I try to learn how to play the music before I understand the system or maybe the parts? I’m not actually learning the music. I’m just…approximating? And if you correct me too quickly, I stop hearing the music and start to focus on what I’m doing wrong?
Amelia shook her head, set the bow back down, and started plucking the same song she was just playing to make the point.
Semara: Almost… If you pluck out a song, we both know the song. Still the same pitches, still the same song, and I - the bow-wielder - know what’s happenin’, because havin’ a bow doesn’t mean I can’t pluck…
El’Heem: Wait, I’m me in this equation right? This is about us…somewhow?
Amelia stopped short mid-rant, looking into his eyes.
Semara: :: Squeaky hope pitching higher :: Somehoooow???
She smiled and shrunk all at the same time. Ironic that the one-word response was finally the thing that stepped her back from the metaphor she dove into neck-deep. What was it she had promised Talia to tell Ras again? Where had those words run off to? They sounded nice at the time. But now she couldn’t even be sure Ras wanted her. If he did when he stepped into the room, she sure did a good job making sure to push him away yet again. She had run into a nest of obfuscation, almost hoping he wouldn’t figure out the mutilated nonsense was about them. Because, if he did, that might mean a true and final answer.
Ras stood up straight, all of the pieces finally clicking into place in his brain. Well not all of them. Part of them. Maybe.
El’Heem: Okay. I’m clearly not dumb. I solved your little riddle…::swallowing:: but I don’t see why it matters. You’re saying we’re not compatible and I’ve already told you I was sorry for even trying. Why are you telling me again that we won’t work?
He crossed his arms and rubbed his cheek in frustration. How much he didn’t understand Amelia or perhaps women in general irked him. Why couldn’t she just come out and say it using normal lines of thought instead of this roundabout rigmarole?
Amelia gaped for a moment, unsure of how Ras concluded that’s what she was saying when he was so close to the real answer before. In truth, she was terrified. That’s why she danced crazily about “the thing.” Her refuge was the bizarro metaphor she’d crafted for herself. With enough confusion, she’d never have to face whether even Ras thought she and her telepathy were strange and fearsome.
Her face pinched into the personification of an exclamation point, until the constipated question came out in one whoosh.
Semara: Do you think I’m a horse murderin’ maniac?
The unsaid, more hopeful afterward: oO Or do you want to learn violin? Oo
She stared at him, an expression something like panic or anger that had finally splattered against the energetic and confident, if presently deeply confused, bedrock of Amelia’s personality. Her eyebrows furrowed and eyes softened, a susurration of thoughts pleading with him to connect the dots: This matters. You matter. I’m so sorry. More than you can know.
Then the walls turned yellow. Bathing them in a strange light that made everything that transpired before that much more perplexing.
If anything, Amelia relaxed, more at ease handling the thing outside the hull than the thing inside her heart.
Semara: :: Exhaling. :: Oh come on! Whatever it is couldn’t’a waited ten more minutes?
She snatched a single piece of fish dinner, and popped it in her mouth the same time as she started kicking off her heels.
Ras raked his hands down his face, pulling his cheeks down and exposing the reds under his eyes. To say he was exasperated by constantly being confused when he wasn’t used to being confused ever would be an understatement. Part of him wished he’d never had to feel any of this. Wished he could just be regular, old, uncomplicated Ras. But you couldn’t put the fire back into Pandora’s box, and he knew that.
El’Heem: Oh, for M’rathyr’s sake.
Amelia had switched off the mood that had made her so delphic in an instant. If nothing else, he wondered if she could teach him how to compartmentalize so well.
And then she disrobed.
The act of slipping off her dress to change into her black uniform hadn’t even occurred to her as something noteworthy until it was already halfway done. For a split second, she was her prankish self, giving Ras a loony grin and an explanation. Had she been thinking, she’d have been in danger of noticing the way he hadn’t managed to jettison his feelings for her at all.
Somehow her not being completely nude, and wearing undergarments left more to the imagination. It was somehow worse and better at the same time. This time he didn’t tear his eyes away. If she wasn’t embarrassed, why should he be? His eyes turned a lime green, only ever so off of his normal emerald.
Semara: Skirts and environmental suits don’t mix… :: Beat, smiling a little bigger as she zips up. :: Well don’t just stand there! Replicate a uniform if you gotta.
El’Heem: Uhhh. Oh. Right.
Ras moved to the replicator and requisitioned a uniform for himself. He stayed facing away and dropped his pants and shirt and his eyes never drifted from the uniform he was fumbling to step into.
Fully booted and hair fixed in a flash, Amelia hesitated as she looked at Ras. Everything inside her seemed to twist around. In the end, the sudden urgency of a situation from the outside pressing in offered her a clarity weeks of wringing herself out over him hadn’t. She scampered over to him, and threw her arms tight around him, mussing up her hair once again.
Her sudden embrace gave him pause. The uniform was around his waist, leaving his upper half still exposed and the feeling of her skin pressed against his sent warm shivers through him.
Semara: :: Quietly :: I’m so sorry for everything Ras. :: Beat :: Stay safe for me. I need to try again, if you’ll let me.
She let him go, looking up only for a second, hoping she wouldn’t find too much anger there.
And she didn’t. His eyes were a pink haze as he looked back down at her. He wasn’t mad at her. He couldn’t be mad at her. She made it so hard to be.
El’Heem: No more sorry’s from either of us. But next time, no more metaphors either.
Amelia quickly squeezed his hand, and then she was out the door, already trying to figure out what the heck she was feeling and what she’d say to make it all make sense.
Ras slipped the shirt over his head and looked around the now empty room. The chin guitar laid on the couch, projecting far more than an instrument ever should. He touched it reverently as he walked by into the kitchen, like he could glean more understanding just by contact.
The marinating fish in the bowl almost laughed at him. No fish for Ras.
END
---------- ●● ----------
Lieutenant Amelia Magnolia Semara
Intelligence Officer
USS Khitomer - NCC-62400
A239710MA0
&
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Lieutenant Ras El’Heem
Chief Science Officer
USS Khitomer (NCC-62400)
K240106RE3