Dagmar's hard work after Shral left had the happy side effect of resulting in her having the entirety of the next day to rest and relax on her own, with no pending translations awaiting her attention.
The extra sleep had helped a great deal with her lingering symptoms, though she wasn't entirely free from them yet. Still, it was nice not to feel so bloated that her pants dug into her waist and several of her shirts felt intolerably constricting and tight. Better still was the relief of no longer feeling like every single bra she owned chafed. That, in particular, was something Dagmar would most emphatically not miss.
After a nearly indulgent day spent sleeping, eating, and then sleeping again, Dagmar spent her third and final day of rest reading up on the materials Shral had recommended to her, finding them all deeply fascinating. The majority of them were indeed meant for what Andorians thought of as a formal courtship, which was closer to what Humans would call an engagement, and they were all geared towards sifting out unsuitable bondmates or otherwise confirming the compatibility between the courting pair. There were traditional displays of wealth as well as of affection, and some of it was quite beautiful.
In particular, Dagmar found the differences between Human and Andorian courtships especially interesting. There were indeed a lot of similarities, which was very reassuring, but the differences were actually quite neat. The majority of a courtship was considered informal - no official commitments were made, so if the pair decided to go their separate ways no one lost anything but time. The lattermost stage of courtship, however, was a whirlwind of rituals, negotiations, and commitments that ramped up in intensity until reaching the final stage, which was a marriage ceremony. There were fewer details around the marriage part in most of Dagmar's resources, since the information packet seemed to be geared around introducing Andorians from other regions to the local customs of the Clans surrounding Laibok rather than serving as a proper guidebook for the entire process. It was also very possible that each Clan had a unique ceremony, Dagmar supposed. She'd have to ask Shral about it, if things got that far.
What a strange thing, to feel like she'd been turned on her head just the day before and now she was looking up Andorian wedding customs. It almost didn't feel real. More than once Dagmar had found herself reaching up to touch the earring Shral had gifted her, just to make sure it was really there. In some moments, it seemed as though everything was going a little too fast, and yet in the very next everything seemed like it was as it should be, like this was the only logical conclusion to a series of events that had spiralled outwards from her arrival in this strange new future.
How comforting the notion that things were unfolding according to some plan was - and how terrifying was the very real possibility that there was no plan, no safety net in place should she stumble and fall. How did people do it?
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Dagmar wished she could ask her mother for advice. She squashed the thought, shoved it down and away almost as soon as it appeared - but it still hurt. It always did, like a little stabbing thorn in her heart trying to worm its way deeper with every beat. The redheaded woman took a breath and let it go, and then another, and another, until the feeling passed and the prick of tears no longer stung her eyes.
She was getting better at that, she realised. She didn't spiral every time she thought about her family now. It still hurt, and maybe it always would, but it didn't drive her into despair like it used to. Was that good, Dagmar wondered, or was it bad? What was healing supposed to feel like? No one had ever been able to tell her, back on Earth. Even her therapist, Dr. Shore, had really only ever given her platitudes when she'd questioned him.
Dagmar shook her head, as if to shake the thoughts away like beads of water, and refocused on the task at hand.
To keep her thoughts in order when she'd begun reading, Dagmar had a separate PADD on hand to type out questions that came up during her readings. Most of her questions ended up being about whether or not she, as a Human, would even be allowed to participate in most of the rituals and festivals mentioned. Andorians were very standoffish in some respects, and while the ones Dagmar had met had been largely quite accepting of her that didn't mean that folks wouldn't get agitated about a Human mucking about with certain aspects of their culture. Having been mistreated on her birth planet, however mildly in the scheme of things, Dagmar was much more hesitant about opening herself up to further vilification here on Andoria. She didn't keep close tabs on the media outlets here on Andoria, beyond planet-wide news of course, but she had no reason to believe that they wouldn't descend upon her like a pack of wild dogs if given the chance.
Then again, Andorians had surprised her before - maybe it wouldn't be quite so dicey.
She returned to work wearing the courting ring-turned-earring, and a pair of simple ball studs so she didn't feel quite so lopsided. No one noticed them under her hood as she walked.
Dagmar found her workspace much as she'd left it, with a neat little stack of new PADDs for her to work through and her terminal display indicating only two new messages addressed to her. She slid into her chair and checked the messages first.
The first was a general notice about the change in seasons and the need to take appropriate precautions to prevent injury and illness. It reminded Dagmar of the workplace announcements she'd once gotten back in her time, just before an anticipated snow-dump in early winter - just basic safety stuff, really. Dagmar looked it over, well aware that she wasn't familiar with Andoria's changing seasons and what to expect from them. Most of it was sensible advice, so Dagmar forwarded the message to her personal account to review it more thoroughly later.
The second message was a little more interesting: Thelen had sent her a short note on upcoming festivals, including a few food-centric ones that piqued Dagmar's interest. She was, she reflected with some amusement, becoming a bit of a foodie these days, and Thelen knew exactly how to catch her interest. She sent a quick reply, keeping it mostly professional, along the lines of looking forward to expanding her cultural horizons and tacking on a note to let her know a time and date.
Maybe she'd manage to make a few new friends, like she'd considered while recovering. The thought cheered her, though her mood wasn't especially low at that moment.
Thelen replied almost immediately - he must have been on a break: 'In three days. The Bulreeng Taal festival starts in the evening. I'll pick you up. Wear something colourful.'
Bulreeng Taal, Dagmar mused. Colourful fruit-market-ceremony? Surely she couldn't be translating that right. There must be some nuance she was missing. The thought irked her on both a professional and personal level, but she'd have to set aside her impulse to tear open her reference materials to find out more until later, when she wasn't at work.
From there, Dagmar pulled the pile of PADDs over to her and began to sort them. Most of them looked to be a new round of formal agreements nearly riddled with redactions and revisions, leaving her with a mangled document on one PADD and four more that looked mostly intact. It didn't really matter what state the document was in; it wasn't her job to make it pretty, just to make it make sense in multiple languages. From the structure of the sentences around the redacted bits, she could at least determine with reasonably high accuracy if it was a person, a location, or an object being referred to but little else. Sighing, Dagmar started on the intact ones, figuring them for easier and faster work than trying to work out the conjugations around blocked out words that blotted out half of every seventh or eighth sentence.
If the Ambassador had a problem with the mangled document, he could either up her clearance so she could see what the devil she was working with or take it to someone who already had the right clearance level. Frankly, it was irritating that she had been given redacted documents to work on in the first place.
Time trundled along as she worked, checking and rechecking her translations as she went, falling into a kind of rhythm. The redheaded woman was vaguely aware of some of the other aides and translators moving around the office space, but they largely left her to her task.
In many ways, in fact, Dagmar's return to work was utterly unremarkable. Most of the folks she worked with and around had no idea why she'd been gone in the first place, or had hardly noticed her short absence. It wasn't until she was called to Ambassador Thoris' office near the end of her work day that the differences really came to light in the way her heart rate picked up and something in her belly fluttered, purely because she knew Shral would be there.
The moment Dagmar exited the turbolift, a pair of Guardsmen halted her progress and performed a surprisingly thorough search of her person, including a scan and even a pat-down. Dagmar's eyebrows were trying to climb into her hairline by the end of it, but neither Andorian had given her any cause to complain or behaved in any way remotely unprofessionally.
"Protocol, miss." The left-most Andorian assured her as the right-most one had her stand with her arms out and her feet shoulder-width apart. Lefty was a male, and Righty was a female.
Righty felt along her arms, the entire length of her spine and waist, her inner and outer thighs down to her boots, and then - inexplicably- her hair, which was in a more fanciful updo as a return-to-work mood-booster. She encountered a couple of hairpins quickly enough and frowned. Dagmar was left to wonder who had been so nefarious as to conceal something within their hair before and ruin it for everyone else.
"We need you to take down your hair, miss. Will you comply?" Righty inquired, her tone brusque but surprisingly polite given that she most certainly didn't have to actually ask.
Dagmar grimaced, and not just because there were almost a dozen pins and a hair tie holding the braided updo in place. "... Technically, yes, but it's awkward."
Lefty's antennae indicated confusion, wringing just barely enough to be interpreted. When he spoke, it was blunt and almost rude. "Explain."
"There's a… cultural tradition-type thing." Dagmar sighed. "It's not really appropriate for adult, unmarried women to have their hair unbound around people who aren't their spouses or their family."
Lefty glanced over at Righty with straightened antennae, and Dagmar wasn't completely sure but she thought she might have actually caught the two Imperial Guardsmen wrong-footed with her explanation. Had they been expecting her to complain about ruining her hairstyle or something?
Even as she explained, Dagmar felt absurd. Her family had been really, really old-fashioned in some respects, even in her proper place in time, but now she felt foolish. Was she really holding up a routine search over her hair? Ridiculous.
Still, the Canadian woman could remember her mother telling her, in all seriousness, that at the tender age of fourteen Dagmar needed to start wearing her hair up, or in a braid, or even just in some sort of ponytail now that she was older. That it wasn't proper, or ladylike, or done really except for some of the newer generations that didn't respect the old ways like their family did. Dagmar hadn't thought much of it at the time since she hadn't liked wearing her hair loose then anyway, but now…
"That… could present a problem." Righty murmured to Lefty, who looked almost bewildered by the obstacle.
Dagmar narrowed her eyes. "How much of a problem?"
Lefty's gaze caught on her courting earring, and he spoke slowly, carefully. "...We could perhaps detain you and summon your zipruuphviik."
Zipruuphviik? Person-courting? Evidently, there were quite a few terms that Dagmar needed to brush up on. That couldn't be the correct way to translate the word. Courting-person, maybe? Either way, it was clear enough from the line of Lefty's gaze and the use of the word ruuphviik that he was referring to Shral.
If anything, that just made Dagmar feel worse. She wasn't going to pull Shral away from his work to check her hair for weapons, or contraband, or whatever else. He'd said they should be professional in the workplace, and as far as Dagmar could see, dragging him away from his actually pretty important job to look at her hair was not only unprofessional but it was just plain absurd.
"No," Dagmar sighed, feeling her shoulders slump in defeat as she found herself accepting the inevitable. Her hair was going to have to come down. Dagmar reached up and started plucking pins out of her hair. "No, that's just ridiculous. I'm not pulling Shral away from his duties to check my damn hair. It's not worth making this much of a fuss over."
Righty, bless her, actually looked more alarmed by this change of heart and the Andorian woman actually reached out to stop Dagmar. "We don't want you to feel coerced into doing something inappropriate!"
"It's fine." Dagmar huffed, continuing to deconstruct the hairstyle she'd spent entirely too long on that morning and trying to pretend it didn't feel bizarre. She'd never even had her hair down in front of Thelen or Shral, yet. "It's an old tradition and it's not even really in use by most folks anymore anyway."
Like most of the social mores she'd grown up with, the Human woman sighed internally, a little bitter despite herself. So many things were gone and forgotten.
When her hair was loose and free - which felt strange, strange, strange - Dagmar handed over the hairpins and tie to Lefty for inspection. She obligingly stood still while Righty almost gingerly checked to make sure she wasn't hiding anything in the wavy, fizzy auburn mess of her hair. The Andorian woman seemed almost more discomfited by the process than Dagmar was, which was oddly reassuring in a way. Lefty obligingly ran a scanner over the handful of hairpins that had been surrendered, his face and antennae giving nothing away.
Naturally, within seconds the scanner declared that the hairpins were in fact just hairpins and her hair tie, while very stretchy and a lovely blue satin, was utterly mundane otherwise. Lefty returned the items with a completely straight face. Righty finished plucking at Dagmar's hair and immediately stepped back into parade rest.
"All good?" Dagmar asked, to be sure.
Righty cleared her throat, her antennae stiff-straight, and answered, "You're clear."
"Okay, thanks. Sorry for the awkwardness." Dagmar smiled politely, nodded, and got to work twisting her locks into a simple braid on her way down the hall to Thoris' office. She stuffed the hairpins into a pocket, for lack of anywhere else to put them.
At least she'd get to see Shral for a moment, Dagmar consoled herself. That was something to look forward to.
She signalled at the door for permission to enter, as she had always done, and found that despite her earlier tummy-flutters and quickened heartbeat she also felt calmer than before. It was, she realised, partly because she no longer had to be anxious about Shral and his antennae; now, she only had to worry about Thoris.
…Which, obviously, was still very intimidating but Dagmar liked to think she'd been around the Ambassador long enough that he wouldn't bite her head off for no reason anymore. He didn't even shout at her randomly to make her jump terribly often these days! That was an improvement, right? Right. Dagmar pulled her braid over her shoulder and tried not to self-soothe.
Thoris granted her permission to enter, and the security doors slid open to allow her entry. She stepped into the room, her eyes seeking and finding both occupants pouring over an array of PADDs, which they both turned over or switched off as soon as she arrived. Dagmar carefully didn't even look at them, executing a respectful bow from the shoulders towards Thoris and a polite nod-and-smile for Shral while she waited to be acknowledged. It would be unprofessional to express more than that in the workplace, particularly not in front of Thoris. Still, she was sure some of her fondness travelled over the thin, delicate thing that was her fledgeling bond with Shral. The starburst was controlled, contained, in the back of her mind; like a covered lantern, some faint rays escaped from it but largely it was quiet and muted.
The Andorian Ambassador to Earth didn't keep her waiting for long, or at least not as long as he usually did.
"Miss Gunnarssen," He drawled, turning his gaze and antennae towards her from his seat behind his desk. "Now that you've returned from your… brief absence, you'll be working on more sensitive documents than usual for an upcoming Federation conference. Under no circumstances are those documents to leave this building. In fact, I don't want them leaving this floor. You'll be moved to an office up here for the duration to keep security risks to a minimum, and your clearance has been given the bare minimum increase required for you to work on these files. It'll be a little cramped, but your colleagues tell me you don't take up much space anyway."
Dagmar was a little surprised by the instructions, but she kept it mostly off her face. She wouldn't have thought she'd be permitted to work on truly sensitive information for years yet, if ever. She wondered, in the privacy of her own mind, why an Andorian wasn't being assigned this task. "Of course, sir. When does the conference begin?"
Ambassador Thoris waved a hand, as if waving her question aside. "It's seven months out, so you'll have plenty of time. Lieutenant Thelen will get you set up."
He turned away from her towards Shral in a clear dismissal. Dagmar bowed again from the shoulders and made her exit. The starburst sparked once, briefly, with warmth before settling back down again; it felt like approval and set something warm flushing through her.
Unsurprisingly, Thelen was waiting in the hall for her, hands clasped behind his back and antennae alert and attentive. Behind him, at the other end of the door-lined hallway, two Imperial Guardsmen stood at ease on either side of the entrance to the turbolift.
Dagmar felt herself grin as she approached, uttering a warm greeting even as she offered her hand, palm forward. "Thiptho lapth, Thelen."
"Thiptho lapth, Dagmar. You were missed." Thelen answered her with a warm, calf-eyed Andorian smile, antennae that curled gently towards her. He brought his hand forwards to press against hers, and Dagmar felt her grin stretch a little wider.
She saw his amber-yellow eyes catch on her courting ring and paused, waiting for a comment. None came, though Dagmar saw his antennae bow together in amusement.
"I wasn't gone for long," Dagmar demurred, only slowing her stride briefly as Thelen turned with her and walked alongside. Then, gently bumping her elbow against his, she added fondly, "But I missed you, too."
Thelen huffed a short, rasping laugh and gestured for her to follow his lead as he gave her a basic rundown of her new work site.
This hallway was one of the exceptions to the usual Andorian preference for open doorways, Thelen explained, largely due to the sensitivity of some of the data handled by the Ambassador and his immediate support staff. Each doorway was fitted with a blast door that was designed to close and lock itself down upon detecting phaser-fire, weapons scanners, ID tag scanners which checked a live, comprehensive inventory of total data editing and display devices against individual tags embedded in each such item. The tags were embedded into the replicator programs, so making a new PADD also made a new tag which was automatically detected and added to the inventory. Additionally, everyone - and here Thelen really meant everyone - was scanned and searched upon entering or leaving this level of the building.
Dagmar politely refrained from mentioning that she already knew about that last bit, thank you very much. Righty nodded at her from her post as Dagmar and Thelen neared. Dagmar nodded back, because it seemed like the polite thing to do. Lefty remained stoic.
Thelen's path took them to one of the doors closest to the turbolift, and a sensor above the frame scanned them both when Thelen touched the access control pad on the wall beside it. Dagmar paused obligingly, waiting for the scan to finish, and then followed her Guardsman friend inside once it declared them both clear and permitted to be there. The door slid shut behind them almost silently, except for a pressurised hiss.
The room was, as Dagmar had been told, cramped. It looked very much like a file storage room repurposed to host a desk a smidge too large for the space that had been cleared, upon which were perched a dedicated terminal and a formidable-looking tower of PADDs already piled onto it.
Dagmar laughed, short and sharp, and said, "Well, the Ambassador did warn me it would be a little cramped. That's fine - I've made do with worse."
"Made do?" Thelen repeated, sounding puzzled. His antennae wrung together briefly, a sign of confusion that Dagmar was admittedly less familiar with.
Dagmar smiled again, saying, "I'm sure I must have used the phrase before - it means to get by with limited resources, or sometimes substandard ones. In this case, space. It's usually meant humorously, though I've also encountered it spoken grimly."
Thelen hummed, processing the new information with a shallow bow of his antennae towards each other. He was a little more business-like as he proceeded towards the desk and began to inform her of the various security changes, not least of which was a small pin she was to wear on her uniform. Its function, as Thelen explained it, was to track her entry to and exit from the higher security floors; she would be required to sign in and put it on at the beginning of her shift, and sign out and leave it with security at the end of her shift.
Hooking the pin onto the sweater she wore with patient, steady hands, Thelen added, "You'll also be given a new security passphrase and entry code for this terminal, which you'll have to memorise."
Dagmar was aware that her eyebrows had been climbing higher and higher during Thelen's explanations, but now they'd hit their maximum height. That was quite an increase in security and protocol compared to her previous arrangement. Still, if she was going to be working on sensitive documents, it made sense to put some kind of measure in place to keep them from prying eyes.
"Not a problem." Dagmar assured her friend, reaching up to make sure the pin was secure. It was, of course, but Dagmar didn't even want to think about the fuss that would come from losing the thing on her first day. "Thank you, Thelen."
"You are welcome." Thelen smiled, calf-eyed, down at her and Dagmar found herself smiling back purely because her friend was smiling at her in the first place. He reached up and tapped the courting ring at her ear and his antennae bowed. "I take it you've spoken to Shral after all?"
Dagmar felt her face flush, which of course only caused Thelen's antennae to bow further. Clearing her throat, Dagmar strived for something like cool professionalism and almost entirely missed the mark. "We had a very productive conversation, yes."
Thelen snorted, and Dagmar stood still while he tugged on the earring experimentally. "I'm sure you did. Doesn't this hurt?"
"Only when people tug on it!" Dagmar made a face at him, batting his hand away with half-hearted flapping motions. Thelen humoured her and pulled his hand away from the earring in question, but not before flicking it lightly. "But no, I've had these piercings for years. They don't hurt."
"It's quite a statement." The Andorian man commented, and while his tone was deceptively mild Dagmar got the impression that he was understating things rather a lot. Shral had said something similar to her at the time, too.
"I don't have antennae." Dagmar shrugged. "I had to make do."
Thelen frowned down at her, antennae twitching like he was fighting down some sort of indignation and trying not to show it. "You are not substandard, Dagmar. You never have been. Did Vilashral say you were?"
"No, he didn't." Dagmar reassured the Andorian with a thick voice, something almost unbearably warm swelling up beneath her sternum. It was the lingering hormones, she told herself firmly. She was still a little out of sorts, that's all. "He's never treated me poorly, even when things were awkward."
"Good." Thelen said shortly, and the Human woman was only aware of how far back his antennae had reared by the way they now settled forward into a neutral position with her answer. "I hope you will tell me if that ever changes."
"You're not saying you'd pick a fight with Shral, are you?" Dagmar found herself asking, a little alarmed.
"I would prefer not to." Thelen answered with a firm, sober tone, and upon seeing signs of genuine concern in her expression he added a little more lightly, "But someone needs to look out for you, after all. Might as well be me."
And oh - oh , that made Dagmar feel a lot of things all at once. Mostly it was profound affection, but there was a bit of a sinus-stinging, eye-watering, lip-pressing kind of vulnerability threaded through that she was honestly blindsided by. She found herself blinking rapidly to clear her vision, settling her hands on her hips like that would at all help her. It didn't. She sniffed and cleared her throat.
"I'm going to be very unprofessional and hug you now." The redhead told him very seriously.
Thelen merely opened his arms with antennae bowed and eyes smiling. Dagmar tucked herself under his chin, where the top of her head naturally sat anyway, and wrapped her arms around his waist. She squeezed him firmly, or at least firmly for a Human, and pressed her forehead against the hard plane of his chest just below his throat. Thelen smelled like the leather of his uniform and a soft, masculine-reading musk that reminded her vaguely of Shral but different in some fundamental way. It wasn't unpleasant, just alien. She couldn't explain it beyond a strong sense of the-same-but-different, which when she thought about it for a moment made sense; Human brains hadn't evolved to parse Andorian pheromones and olfactory signals.
"You're a really good friend, but you're also a little ridiculous." Her words were muffled by his uniform, but Thelen seemed to understand them well enough. "Don't start something with Shral without talking to me first, okay? Promise me you won't."
"...That seems reasonable." Thelen agreed after a beat.
"Promise." Dagmar insisted, tightening her hold like the man was a flight risk. She wasn't strong enough to really hurt him. "Shral and I are going to make mistakes with each other. I can't be worrying about you rolling out from under a snowdrift to declare ushaan over every little thing while I'm trying to navigate that as well."
Thelen sighed, his breath disturbing the fine flyaway hairs at the top of her head, but he set his chin down on her crown and promised nevertheless, "I give you my word, Dagmar. I'll speak to you first."
The Human woman felt her shoulders relax, surprised at how much they'd tensed. She pressed her forehead more firmly against him and mumbled a relieved, "Thank you."
His arms squeezed her gently and then let her go when she moved to step back. Dagmar wiped a lingering bead of moisture away from one eye under the pretense of having an eyelash in her eye. Both refrained from commenting on the fact that she clearly didn't.
Straightening herself, Dagmar swallowed, took a breath, and put her professional persona back on. "Alright, that's enough of that on my first day back. I'll get familiar with everything in here and get started on this leaning tower of PADDS, I think."
Thelen nodded, though his bright amber-yellow eyes were still smiling-soft, and took his leave saying only, "You know how to reach me if you need anything."
When the door closed behind him, Dagmar found herself frowning at the space where her friend had been. It was sweet, really, that Thelen was so protective of her - but sometimes she wondered. The idea of her friends, really her only friends on the planet, coming into some kind of conflict with one another bothered her immensely. She'd have to have a conversation with Thelen when she saw him outside of work, sometime; that wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to leave to fester.
Shaking her head, feeling her braid swing over her shoulder with the motion, Dagmar sighed and got to work getting familiar with her new closet-office. She'd start with memorising the access codes. Someone had thoughtfully written it out for her on a small paper note, roughly the size of a post-it note.
It was sixty-seven characters long, without spaces , in sweeping, blade-like Andorii. The characters were so cluttered just looking at them gave her a headache.
"Åh, hva faen![1]" Dagmar swore, and startled herself by slipping into Norsk the way she used to, back when she was home with her family. It startled her so much, in fact, that she found herself staring at her reflection in the black screen of the inactive terminal before her. It wasn't her most attractive expression, as it turned out.
That had felt… good -natural - the way it used to, before she'd had to learn Federation Standard. Before she'd filled her brain with so many new alien languages until it felt like there wasn't space for the old ones anymore. Without the universal translator active in her office, or in most parts of the building for that matter, the almost reflexive curse was a stark contrast to the smooth, vowel-heavy Andorii she'd gotten used to speaking.
Maybe, she thought, maybe she could start speaking Norsk again. Just a little, so she wouldn't forget, to herself when she wouldn't be bothering anyone else.
Not that there was anyone else to speak Norsk to, really. The Norsk she had grown up speaking wasn't the same as the Norsk spoken today. Back in her time there had been a big push to swap over to Nynorsk [2]from the much older Bokmål [3], which arose in her grandparents' time as a backlash to the German invasion of Norway during the second World War as a way of distancing the language from its Germanic roots. It hadn't been wildly popular when she'd been born and it mostly took the form of written language over spoken, but apparently it had really kicked off in the last two hundred years. That, plus linguistic drift and ever-changing slang had rendered the modern version of Norsk almost incomprehensible to Dagmar at first.
She'd tried, though - oh how she'd tried, desperately, to find some way to connect to her own culture at first. Several professors wanted to record her saying nonsense phrases and words, to compare how she sounded to how modern speakers did. Regular people, though? They thought she sounded archaic and almost overbearingly formal. More than one student had told her she sounded pretentious, even.
Dagmar guessed that's when she'd stopped speaking the language she'd learned alongside English as a child. It was certainly when she'd stopped trying to reach out for roots that simply weren't there anymore. But there wasn't anyone on Andoria to say those things to her, was there? She could speak Bokmål here and no one would be any the wiser. No one would care, since it wasn't like it would ever come up in a translation or her work.
The thought was strangely freeing, like something in her chest that had been tight for so long she had simply grown used to it and now it was finally relaxing into something that let her breath a little more.
Maybe, Dagmar thought with a growing, silly smile, maybe she'd try to find a replicator program for pickled herring and pinnekjøtt [4]for old time's sake. After all, the replicated version couldn't taste any worse than the real stuff had - though, admittedly, that might have been because her mother's attempt at making pinnekjøtt herself had gone a little awry during the smoking process.
If she really wanted to live it up a little, she could try to find a program for lefse [5] and lutefisk [6], the latter of which was pretty tasty once it had enough bacon and butter mixed in. Maybe if the nostalgia wasn't too overwhelming she could take comfort in the fact that Lars wouldn't be able to steal all of the damn lefse for himself for a change.
Under no circumstances was she going anywhere near smalahove [7], though. No one deserved to have to eat that. Not even Lars, the little lefse -thief.
Spirits, she missed Lars. He had been such an asshole at times, but he was still her little brother and she'd loved him so, so much. She'd eat a whole plate of lefse in his memory, Dagmar decided with stinging eyes and a watery grin.
Then she sniffed, blinked away the watery edges of her vision, and settled in to work.
Beta-read by the ever lovely Emilie_786!
Notes:
1 Norwegian (Bokmål): Oh, what the fuck.
2 Nynorsk: Literally means new Norwegian. After WWII, there was a strong cultural desire to pull away from the Germanic (and Danish by association) roots within Norwegian culture as a result of the German occupation of the country. Primarily a written form of Norwegian, based on country dialects and constructed in the 19th century to serve as a national language more clearly distinct from Danish than Bokmål. It is a mandatory subject in most, if not all, schools.
3 Bokmål: Literally means book-tongue. It is the spoken language in Norway, which has Danish and Germanic roots. Many of the older generations consider it 'proper' Norwegian, unlike Nynorsk.
4 Pinnekjøtt: racks of lamb or mutton cured in brine or coarse sea salt. Once sufficiently cured, and when the weather is cold enough, the racks are hung in a cool, dark, well ventilated place to dry. Fresh racks are commonly smoked prior to drying. Before cooking, the racks are separated into individual ribs by cutting a sharp knife between the bones. The ribs must then be soaked in water in order to rinse out the salt and reconstitute the meat. After soaking, the ribs are steamed over a little water in a large saucepan.
5 Lefse: a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread. It is made with flour, can include riced potatoes, and includes butter, and milk, cream, or lard. There are many ways of flavouring lefse.
6 Lutefisk: It is made from aged stockfish (air-dried whitefish), or dried and salted cod, cured in lye. The fish adopts a gelatinous texture after being rehydrated for days prior to eating. For it to become edible, lutefisk must again be soaked in cold water. The first step is soaking it for five to six days, with the water changed daily. The saturated lutefisk is then soaked in an unchanged solution of cold water and lye for an additional two days. The fish takes on a jelly-like consistency. When this treatment is finished, the fish (saturated with lye) is inedible, having a pH of 11–12. To make the fish edible, a final treatment of yet another four to six days of soaking in cold water (also changed daily) is needed. The lutefisk is then ready to be cooked, usually by searing. It is traditionally served with boiled potatoes, mashed green peas, melted butter and small pieces of fried bacon, but is also often served with a white sauce.
7 Smalahove: A Western Norwegian traditional dish made from a sheep's head, originally eaten before Christmas. The skin and fleece of the head are torched, the brain removed, and the head is salted, sometimes smoked, and dried. The head is boiled or steamed for about three hours, and served with mashed rutabaga and potatoes. The more you eat, the more it smiles at you - a fact often greeted with horror by small children.
