This chapter is dedicated, with showers of pink confetti, to my good friend and faithful reviewer wee-me, without whom I would have given up and gone home long ago. So you may blame her for this if you like ::grins:: But I insist you go read her stories—she has an unmatched flair for description. ::opens curtain::
The next morning B'Elanna woke up nervous, and the feeling didn't leave her all the way down to the holodeck. The program Torres A was already running, and the safeties were off. Merciless guilt ransacked her stomach—that lake was full of deep undercurrents and treacherous spillways—no easy path even for an experienced swimmer. If he had attempted it without her…! She rushed through the door, calling Vorik's name, but there was no answer. The climbing wall was a blank face of morning-warmed granite, and she didn't feel like dealing with it. "Computer, stairs!" A gently sloping path of rough dirt stairs appeared in front of the wall and she sprang over them, leaping over the wall in a tenth of the time it would have taken her to climb it. It was her program, and it was full of shortcuts. She was a very busy person. She had never before thought that she might have to rescue some foolish Vulcan from a man-eating lake.
Crashing through the underbrush, she called out to him again, but only silence met her sensitive ears. The woods seemed unusually dense, and briars tore at her cheeks as she forced her way through to the shore. There, at the edge of the lake, sitting perfectly oblivious in his Starfleet issue swim gear, mask at his side, was the reason for her thundering heart. B'Elanna dropped to her knees beside him and took him by the shoulders, wanting to shake him as hard as she could. "Vorik, didn't you hear me calling?"
He looked up at her, his eyes curiously blank. His mouth opened and closed, and he blinked, but said nothing. She shook her head at him, and realized that his shoulders were damp with dew moisture. "How long have you been out here?"
His dark eyes broke to the pebbled beach, not quite meeting the waterline. "Three hours and twenty two minutes."
B'Elanna swallowed, her nervousness back in a trembling rush. "You weren't planning to swim without me, were you?"
He wouldn't meet her eyes. "Yes."
She forced him to look at her, gazing deep enough to make certain she made a connection. "Vorik, this lake is incredibly dangerous. It has undertows, and whirlpools. Never swim here without me. Do you understand?"
His breathing accelerated, and his heart rate with it, and she had to force herself not to look away, not to allow him to keep his pride. This was too important. He was too important, she realized. "Please," she added. His gaze softened slightly, and he nodded.
"I am sorry to have upset you, B'Elanna."
"I'm here to teach you how to swim, not to resuscitate you, Ensign." She allowed a glint of flinty anger to leak out of her expression, now that she could accept that a crisis had been averted. He lifted a consummate Vulcan eyebrow at her.
"Yes, sir." He had reverted to the ultimate formality, calling her sir. It felt like a wall; one without crevices in which to find purchase.
"Right." She stood briskly. No sense in trying to salvage that situation. On to the next. "This is not where we are going to swim. Computer. End Torres A." The lake vanished around them, and Vorik stood calmly, as if he hadn't been on the brink of death a moment before. He was made of such extremes, she mused—the intense violence and the blank passiveness, all bound within moments of each other. It was disconcerting. She directed her attention to the program instead. "Computer, begin Torres Ocean B. Depth begin at one meter, angle outward at fifteen degrees. Flora and fauna." She paused, thinking, and then added, "No jellyfish."
"Jellyfish?" Vorik queried. B'Elanna just smiled, as the water came into existence around them. At first, Vorik stood stock still, his knees locked, and she reached out and took his forearms to help him balance. They stood close to each other as the water level rose up above their hips. The brilliant blue of Earth's Caribbean ocean gleamed out in all directions, and he stared in amazement around them, his hands clutching at her biceps. "This is on Earth?"
"Yes. The Caribbean."
His brow darkened momentarily. "Where you taught Tom Paris to wind sail."
B'Elanna raised her own eyebrow at this revelation. "Have you two been trading stories about me? Because that can stop."
He looked back at her, disconcerted. "No, B'Elanna. He was only trying to make me feel better about learning to swim. I would not betray your confidence in such a manner."
She narrowed her eyes at him, but he seemed genuinely sincere. So rather than prodding him, she reached for his mask and tugged it out of his fingers. "You won't be needing this right away." She had let hers drop to the sandy bottom already, luxuriating in the feel of the warm water seeping through the light water cloth. "You have to learn to trust the water to hold you up before you can begin to swim. I want you to lay back in the deeper water over here, and relax. Just keep your nose above the water, and let everything else go."
Vorik looked at her with clear apprehension in his eyes, although he struggled to present a calm façade. But he attempted to do as she asked, first trying to sit down in the water, and then bending down to lie on his back on the bottom. B'Elanna struggled not to grin—it was hard not to watch him flail like this and not laugh, but she knew if she insulted his pride now she would never get him back. "Here, watch me," she said, after he stood and shook himself off in frustration. She set her back against his forearm so that he could feel her relax, and then she just gave herself over to the waves. She felt him trying to hold her up, but she shook her head at him. "Let me go. Trust the water." As her ears went under the waves, the sounds of her starship throbbed into life, and the thunder of her heart, and the gentle washing of the waves. Bliss. She felt his hand slide down the length of her back, leaving her to the burden of the wave, and she smiled gently at him. He was gazing down at her, a bemused expression on his young face.
After she rose, she let him sink slowly against her arm, which is what she should have done in the first place, and he was able to use her arm as a counterpoint to find his balance. She could feel the muscles in his back knotting and unknotting, and she stroked her hand along his shoulder blades until the tension eased. Finally, she asked him to balance on her hand as she spread her fingers on the small of his back, and to let every other muscle group relax. Slowly, he complied. He didn't even notice, a moment later, when she took her hand away.
The time passed too quickly. Once Vorik had gotten the hang of floating, swimming came naturally to him, and soon they were off exploring the ocean floor. She had always been fascinated by the variety of plant and animal life at the bottom of the shallow blue ocean, and as they swam among schools of brightly colored fish and coral, she felt the tensions of the past month ease and let go entirely. Vorik was her friend, and she had found a sparring partner, and had reclaimed the third part of her engineering team. And Tom Paris could go suck on a spanner if he had a problem with it.
Time for shift beginning loomed ominously near, and B'Elanna surfaced regretfully, with Vorik right behind her. He turned to look behind them at the sparkling vista one last time, and feeling mischievous, she twisted away from him, diving down and around him, and came up behind him, jumping on his back and shoving him down into the waves. He tried to capture her hands but she had the advantage, and he went completely under, rising a moment later in a sheer wave of sparkling water, his mouth gasping open and eyes squeezed tight. She was laughing, and he plunged toward her by sound only, scrubbing salt water out of his eyes. She narrowly escaped him, spurting out of his grasp, only to feel his firm grasp on her hip a second later as he lifted her up in his arms and tossed her screaming a clear meter out into the blue water. When she surfaced again, he was emerging from under the ocean, rinsing off his face and hair, and watching her with a wary sparkle in his dark eyes.
She thought, in that moment, that he had never looked more beautiful.
The nervous butterflies came to life all over again.