AN: Whew, the music got a little dark there for a while-- someone switched on the Skinny Puppy while i was AFK. I think it might have been my cat... Thank you to my priceless wee-me and to thevulcanprincess for reviews-- i've said this before, but reviews are water in the desert, and interactive, too! Reviewers get to add input! Onward...
For the next several weeks, they alternated mornings of swimming and fighting with mornings of sheer crippled exhaustion from which neither of them could raise themselves from their bunks. On one occasion, B'Elanna commed Vorik to tell him that she wasn't going to make it, and he thanked her with a slight tremble in his voice. The night before they had spent three hours working out in 3 G's after the captain had been displeased with a minor setback in the energy curtailment schedule. It had been nobody's fault, but Carey had volunteered to fix it, and Vorik and B'Elanna had both headed to the holodeck for a rare afterhours workout, feeling frustrated and sullen. They had met, surprised, at the door, from opposite ends of the corridor, and he had bowed her in and chosen the most punishing routine they had programmed in.
They had also both taken to carrying their injuries with a certain amount of pride, as long as they weren't too obvious or didn't interfere with the job. When B'Elanna dislocated Vorik's jaw again, he had the Doctor fix it. B'Elanna had come along to explain, but the Doctor had his own ideas.
"The two of you look like you've been using each other for target practice. Something I should know about?" Vorik stared stonily ahead and B'Elanna scowled, rubbing her bruised cheek, where Vorik had clipped her with a solid fist just before she had kicked him in the jaw and downed him. The Doctor smiled at them both pleasantly. "No? Certain this isn't some obscure Vulcan/Klingon mating custom that escaped us the first time around?"
"Doctor, you do like being repaired, don't you?" B'Elanna had asked icily. But the question had hung heavily in the air between them long after they had left sickbay. Finally, she had asked Vorik, as they suited up in the shallows one morning about a week after.
"Is this helping you the way you had hoped, Vorik?" Her voice was fraught with other possibilities, other questions that she could have asked. He turned to her, considering her face for a moment.
"You mean to ask if I still want you as a mate? As the Doctor suggested?" His voice, in contrast, was full of steady calm. She nodded, hanging onto his calm like an anchor. His brow creased slightly. "I do still desire you as a mate, B'Elanna." Her heart hammered in her chest, and she flushed, turning on her earlier judgment. How could he talk about this so calmly? "But I was overconfident when I forced that decision on you." He turned to her now, and she couldn't look away from him, from the fading bruise under his ear where her hand had slipped past his guard two days ago; or the white thread of a narrow scar at the line of his jaw that she didn't even remember giving him. "I will not bond you without your consent. And Vulcans cannot mate without the bond."
But despite her asking, he would not tell her more. So eventually, she ceased to ask, hoping that he would decide to tell her when he was ready, and uncertain what she was hoping to gain with the knowledge of it.
One evening, about two weeks after Vorik's jaw had healed, they were working on a series of throws from a variety of cultures, turning one style against another in a battle that had become increasingly and more obviously brutal to everyone but themselves. Spotting injuries to either of them had become a bit of a sport to the rest of the engineering crew, and Tuvok had spoken to Vorik privately on the matter, as Chakotay had to B'Elanna. But both had sincerely denied that anything but honest sports competition had been taking place. Vorik spun a nasty slice toward B'Elanna as he slowly related Tuvok's words.
"He told me that he was most concerned that I would injure you, and that my superior strength was a most unfair advantage." B'Elanna dodged him easily and slammed a kick into his thigh, which he rolled off with a grunt and shook off as if it were nothing. She grinned, thinking of that vaunted Vulcan pride, and how Tuvok would blush if he knew the truth.
"What did you tell him?" Vorik eyed her with practiced ease as she tensed the wrong muscle groups to throw him off, and then launched himself into her real attack with the force of a phaser cannon, knocking her backwards into a tucking roll. She caught his abdomen with her heels on the way back up with the strength of a forward kick, leaving him winded. He reeled back for a moment, and then steadied himself, blinking.
"I invited him to come and teach us the ancient Earth discipline of Gong Fu, which he regards highly."
She paused, straightening. "Oh. Did he accept?" The thought of Tuvok invading their private sanctum was somewhat… disquieting. And the surfacing of that thought bothered her. Did she really consider this time private, or even sacred? Vorik studied her, and then bowed slightly, standing down in the way that he did when he observed that she was no longer engaged in their wargames.
"He told me that he would consider it." Vorik sat comfortably on the ground, a sandy desert that seemed to stretch for miles, and peered up at her. "What of Chakotay and his concern for you?"
B'Elanna shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. "He wanted to know if you looked as bad as I did."
Vorik almost smiled. He did that more and more often in her company now, nearly exposing emotional states. After everything they had put each other through, wearing masks seemed an excessive use of energy. "Did you tell him that I invariably look worse?" She chuckled with velvet in her voice, but didn't reply. Actually, she had, to ease Chakotay's worried frown, but she didn't want to expose Vorik like that, with just the two of them here. It seemed unnecessarily cruel. He had taken an immense amount of punishment from her, more than any three people could have been expected to bear, and he was still here. True, he gave out as good as he got, and she wouldn't stand for anything less than his finest effort. Their constant wargames had developed iron where muscle used to lay. B'Elanna had never been so strong, or so fast. Or so determined.
"Vorik, I have a proposal for you."
He squinted at her in the bright desert sun, his eyebrow quirked in amusement at her choice of words. "I will endeavor to hear it with composure, B'Elanna." He was toying with her, using his own tranquility as a shield as she got flustered at him. But she had learned a great deal about Vulcan composure, and Vulcan emotion as well. It was all a matter of subtlety. B'Elanna had never been subtle before she had met Vorik. It was still not much more than a clumsy weapon in her hands, while he was the clear master. But she was a quick study, and he was an excellent teacher.
"I want to learn something from you that I know that you will not teach me willingly." She kept her voice from betraying the importance of this request. He lifted both eyebrows at her. Both eyebrows was a good sign, she knew. One eyebrow was often a sign of contempt, or of mild interest at best. But both eyebrows meant he was listening. She focused on him, forcing out thoughts of everything else. This was all that mattered at the moment. "I will fight you for the honor of learning the Vulcan nerve pinch."
Both eyebrows shot straight up past his slightly wind-ruffled hairline. She wanted to smile, delighted that she had managed to shock him, but this was important. Of all the disciplines they had studied, this had been overtly missing, and she was willing to do nearly anything to earn the right to know it. His brows came together in a frown, and she prepared for the rebuttal.
It came in the form she expected. "Tuvok would not approve."
"Tuvok isn't here." B'Elanna heard the beginnings of a purr in her throat, and evidently Vorik did as well, because his eyes widened slightly. So much for subtle, she thought.
He stood in one fluid motion, and reached for her hand, lifting her up. "Very well." And without any more warning, he attacked. She barely kept her footing in the shifting sand, and for a long minute, as a quick shower of brutal blows sent her reeling, didn't think she had made a very good bargain. But slowly, her determination and focus reasserted itself, and she began to fight him in earnest. And then she realized that he had been waiting for her to begin.
This combat was the longest they had ever engaged in. Vorik was defending the right of his people to keep private a technique that gave him a tactical advantage in nearly every conflict situation possible. B'Elanna wanted that advantage for herself; knew that she could master it if she was given a chance. She was strong enough if Vorik was. That he had never used it against her was telling—he must have been certain that she could have worked it out on her own. All of this flew through her mind and out as the searing heat of their dance took over ever available synapse, every flicker of reason, every breath in her body. All they became were shadows of each other, he reaching for where she had been a heartbeat before, she bowing gracefully beneath a surging blow and slicing outward to meet the whisper of heat where his body had vacated the space she had just entered. For a long moment, neither of them could even land a single touch on the other.
It felt… lonely.
And just as B'Elanna was forced to acknowledge such a feeling, Vorik's reaction time slowed, just slightly. Just enough. And her world shattered into red pain as her wrist connected with his hip, the hardest bone she could have possibly hit. Enraged, she screamed and threw herself against him, and he lost his balance, stumbling in the shifting sand, and fell flat on his back. Hot with bloodlust, panting and victorious, B'Elanna locked him down against the ground. He shifted and stretched against her, his eyes seeking the path of her hands against his forearms as she stared down at him, but he couldn't dislodge her. When she spoke, her voice came from far away, like the roaring of the surf. "Teach me." All she could feel was the tensing and untensing of his body, still fighting, unwilling to accede. Stubborn Vulcan pride.
But he would not answer. His eyes on hers, dark and defiant, suddenly lost focus. And B'Elanna Torres, in the midst of a red battle haze, realized her only tactical error a second too late. While she had effectively pinned down his body, she had left his head free, trusting that her bony head ridges would protect her from attack. Instead, he came up at an entirely different angle than what she was expecting, and kissed her hard on the mouth. Her breath caught in her throat as his body relaxed under hers, as her grip on his tense muscled melted into a flood of blood-tinged desire.
He flipped her effortlessly, landing her in the sand solidly half a meter away, and pinning her without hope for escape. It was his one incontrovertible advantage, and he knew how to use it. She closed her eyes, wanting to shut out the sight of him, the copper taste of him still on her lips. Her blood still pounded, but all the fight had left her. She sighed. "That was ungentlemanly, Vorik."
He was silent for so long that she finally had to open her eyes. To her surprise, he was staring at her with a complex mixture of shock and tenderness in his expression, something she had rarely seen even in a human. He shook his head at last.
"I have no explanation for my behavior, B'Elanna. You have won. I will teach you, if you will allow me."
He lifted himself off of her, and handed her up. She gave him an odd look. "You used a tactical advantage, Vorik. I fail to see how that makes me the winner."
"I took advantage of you, where I promised I would always give you a choice. I am at fault. Please, allow me to make amends, B'Elanna." He looked genuinely stricken.
She nodded. "Alright." Retreat in the direction of her original goal seemed strange, but she had no other place to go if she were to allow him to save face in his determined manner.
"Come to my quarters tomorrow evening. This is a private matter."
She eyed him with a little of her humor restored, as her breath came more easily. "If that's the case, come to mine. I have a higher security clearance."
He nodded, and then his gaze lingered on her mouth for a tiny, flickering instant before he turned and walked out the holodeck door.
It took a few moments before B'Elanna realized that she hadn't followed him.