TWO: Trigger

Dagmar groaned, alternating between massaging her temples and pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead in a hopeless attempt to alleviate her headache.

"Here." A voice, soft and sibilant and such a nice change from the shouting and snarling of the Tellerite section of the Embassy. Blearily, Dagmar looked up at the speaker, raising her head from her hands. It was Thelen, a relatively young security officer assigned to the Andorian ambassador. His antennae wiggled at her as he bowed from the shoulders upon her acknowledgement of him; not an affectionate greeting, by any standards, but friendly enough.

The almost reflexive reaction to cringe at the antennae-gesture was absent not because she was especially fond of the Andorian, but because she was exhausted.

The redhead accepted the cloth with a weary smile. A hypospray would have been more effective, but Dagmar didn't like those –there was something very unsettling about them. Still, it helped. Combine that with the cooler temperature and the utterly blissful silence of the Andorian section of the Embassy, and Dagmar had found her own personal patch of heaven. She didn't rise from her seated position on the floor in the lobby area, back against a cool, pale beige wall and legs bent at the knees so her elbows could rest on them. Instead, she motioned for Thelen to join her, since he was off-duty by that point (the Tellerites had kept her long past nightfall with their enraged complaints and rants) and the security officer obliged her.

The Embassy was all but deserted, save for a few aides who were working overtime, and there was no one to stare.

"You were gone longer than usual this time." Thelen commented as he made himself comfortable to her right. The Andorian knew most of her work-relating comings and goings, if only because they were repetitive and consistent... especially so, when Ms. White was hounding her. He noticed when you routine varied by so much as five minutes –which lead Dagmar to the conclusion that the Andorian had entirely too much time on his hands.

She'd spoken to Thelen a few times in the past and had grown fond of the Andorian. He was curious about Terran customs and, between the pair of them, he and Dagmar had managed to puzzle out most of the newer, post-twenty-first-century customs. More often than not, the Canadian had found herself comparing new customs with the older ones that she was more familiar with, speculating on the reasons for the changes and debating the merit of either adapting or retaining the older pattern of behaviour. Thelen's contribution to those debates was never particularly paradigm-shifting, but he appeared to enjoy listening to them.

... He reminded her of her brother; thoughtful and clever. Something in her ribcage constricted at the thought, a sharp ache that made her eyes sting.

Dagmar didn't bother to hide her grimace as she confessed, "They might just drive me to suicide at this rate." –Dagmar turned the damp cloth over when one side grew too warm and resettled it against the back of her neck- "They've started to team up on me, now! They don't look that scary at first, but when you have five tearing into you at once, it's downright frightening."

The twenty-first-century woman made no secret of her inability to understand or relate to Tellerites. Having been raised with a very Scandinavian slant on her upbringing, Dagmar had always placed a great deal of emphasis on good manners and etiquette –the exact opposite of Tellerite behaviour- and the Tellerite custom of greeting someone by insulting them never failed to rub her the wrong way. It didn't matter that, intellectually, she knew the shorter aliens were trying to be polite –the whole thing still upset her.

Thelen's antennae bowed towards each other in a display of amusement, and he adopted a facsimile of a Human smile, or at least as much of one as he could, given that Andorian facial muscles were not as extensive or developed as a Human's were. The effect the expression had on the narrow features of his face was... odd, to say the least, but Dagmar never said anything about it. She was just glad that someone made an effort to meet her halfway when it came to communicating. "Should I arrange an escort for you?"

His sense of humour was improving, too, the Canadian noted absent-mindedly. Or, rather, his attempts at Terran humour were, which most Andorians found incomprehensible. Whereas Terran humour ranged from slapstick to clever plays on words and self-depreciating jabs, Andorian humour tended to be extremely subtle, relying on a complex set of propositional grammars. Despite her best efforts, Dagmar couldn't quite grasp their sense of humour –but she did, at least, learn to recognize when an Andorian was making a joke.

Of course, all of the Andorians knew she didn't find their humour particularly funny, but they all seemed to have an unspoken agreement that, so long as the Canadian acknowledged the attempt and smiled anyway, they wouldn't call her on it.

She snorted, eyes sliding closed as her fatigue rose to the forefront. "Good god, no -then they'd really make fun of me, and I'd never hear the end of it!"

A yawn, half-stifled, punctuated her sentence and, resting her head back against the wall, Dagmar mumbled an apology. She never thought she'd say it, but the Canadian missed her uptight boss; running around and arguing with diplomats all by herself was beyond exhausting –particularly when the Tellerites were involved. They certainly put her through her paces today, at the very least.

Silence drifted in between them, and if it was an uncomfortable silence, any discomfort on Dagmar's part was dulled by her sheer lack of energy. At length, Dagmar pushed herself to her feet –something which took far more effort than it should have. Suppressing another yawn, the redhead removed the damp face cloth from her neck, mumbling, "If I stay here any longer, I'm going to fall asleep."

Thelen didn't say anything, but he saw her out of the Embassy, plucking the cloth out of her hands and tossing it negligently onto a nearby bench as they went.

The action was so much like something her brother, Lars, might have done that it hurt. It hurt, thinking about her family only to remember that they were gone, that over two hundred years separated her from them –all because of one stupid man's ambition.

The Canadian didn't trust her voice to hold under the emotional turmoil that rose in answer to that thought, so she nodded to Thelen instead of bidding him good night and stepped out into the muggy night and flagging down what was essentially a glorified taxi. If Dagmar saw the confused twitching of the Andorian's antennae, she pretended not to notice.

When Dagmar arrived at her standardized apartment –empty picture frames, Spartan- she found that sleep evaded her, despite her exhaustion. She found herself sitting on the edge of her bed, fingers forming a steeple while her elbows rested upon her knees, eyes fixed upon nothing in particular. Over and over, her mind replayed memories –some new, most old- and the faces of her parents, her little brother, seemed to grow more and more vivid as the hours slipped by.

It wasn't until the first rays of a false dawn caught her eyes that Dagmar was brought back to reality. Her muscles cramped and ached, gone stiff with cold and immobility, and her face was damp with rapidly cooling tears. She must have spent the entire night like that, lost in memory.

She hadn't even realized she'd been crying.

The Canadian stood, slowly, grimacing at the tugs and pulls of unhappy muscles and the pins-and-needles of sleeping limbs. She felt strange, unwell –like something spread too thin, lacking substance or any semblance of strength- and recognized the feeling for what it was. Intellectually, at least.

'Completed the grieving process, my ass.'

Half-walking, half-staggering over to the computer at her desk was the easy part of the solution, but it was a long moment before the redhead could force her fingers to punch in the commands. Even then, almost immediately after she entered the command to send the message, regret took a stab at her. The man had put up with enough of her emotional baggage –why was she inflicting more of it upon him? Hadn't he done enough for her already?

A beep startled the Canadian, drew a gasp, and nervous, fluttering hands rand through her hair and over her face. She knew she looked far from presentable –damn it, why had she called?- but it was too late now.

Sitting down, still stiff and cold, Dagmar opened the channel.

"Miss Gunnarsen." A calm voice greeted her. "It is agreeable to see you again."