ELEVEN: Tolerable

It was a fairly cool day –unusual, for San Francisco in the summer- and Dagmar thought it smelled like rain. The red-headed woman had left the Andorian compound shortly after breakfast, more out of an ingrained respect for hospitality and a desire not to overstay her welcome than any real need to leave, but instead of heading home, she'd found herself wandering around the city. There was a sort of restlessness in her that day, a near tangible thing like too much caffeine in her blood, that set her at a brisk pace, long legs striding in the first direction that took her fancy.

A handful of hours had passed before the Canadian came across a familiar face –it was one of the Vulcan aides, whose name, much to her embarrassment, evaded her. Choosing her words carefully, she had asked after Kov's health, mentioning that she'd heard that he was unwell and hoped for a swift recovery. The aide agreed to pass along her 'well wishes' stoically, giving Dagmar no indication as to whether or not he was already aware of Kov's condition, and then left.

Rolling her eyes and reflecting that Vulcans were not much for conversation, Dagmar moved on. There was no particular destination in mind that day –mindless strolling was the order of the day. She spent some time passing through the Academy campus, greeting what students she knew, and visiting a stocky and intimidating Russian fellow named Grigor who owned a pub near the pier. He was a tall man, built like a tank, and well past his prime with touches of grey at his temples but still strong, and his face seemed to sit in a natural scowl that belied his fundamentally friendly nature.

When Terra Prime (an organization that Dagmar didn't know much about, but understood to be violent xenophobes) had been more vocal about her presence –divided into the half that wanted her there and the half that hated her on principle- Grigor had been one of the ordinary, decent citizens to help her with the hecklers and the hurled insults. One a particularly bad day, when she had been heckled by a group of women determined to declaim everything from her intelligence to her parenthood as primitive and a step backwards for all of humanity, Grigor had appeared from one of the nearby shops –a quiet little pub that he tended- and pulled her off the street and onto a barstool. Free drink included.

Ever since, she and he had been fast friends –more so when she helped the stoic man name his kittens. His cat Misha had run away from home and came back with a surprise, as it were, leaving Grigori with the task of naming six or seven new furballs. Grigori was a fundamentally sensible, solid sort of man, as honest as they came, but lacked much in the way of imagination; he was a bartender because his father was a bartender and he had neither the ambition nor imagination to wonder about doing something else, despite being quite bright. Thus, Dagmar had offered to help.

Thus, Grigori's feline roommates were named Vlad, Vanya, Klaus, Boris, and Fluffles.

They'd arm-wrestled over each name, and Dagmar seriously suspected she'd only won the last round for Fluffles because the Russian felt sorry for her; arm-wrestling wasn't exactly her forte.

"And you are enjoying your work, eh?" Grigor asked, his accent thick but understandable. He was wiping down the bar counter top and setting up chairs in preparation for the early evening crowd. It was half past four.

"Mmhm!" Dagmar nodded enthusiastically. "I mean, the translation side isn't as interesting, but I'm enjoying working with the Andorians and I've made a couple friends. The Tellerites, not so much, though."

"Da. They are wery rude." Grigor agreed with a knowing nod. He'd had the misfortune of catering to a gaggle of Tellerites before it was well known that they're version of being polite was to be horrendously rude. "I am not liking zem so much –more than before, but still not so much, too. But ze Andorians are good, sensible people –zey like quiet and zey like drinking!"

The toothy grin that topped off the Russian's enthusiastic approval would have terrified anyone who didn't know that Grigori wasn't a Slavic Murder Machine.

"And the Vulcans?" She wondered aloud with a knowing smile.

"Bah! Miserable!" Grigor declaimed. His accent dragged out the vowels on the first and last syllables – 'meeesreeebull!'- as he waved the question away with a dismissive gesture. "Zey don't drink, don't eat meat like sensible persons, don't laugh... Wulcan must be a terrible place!"

Dagmar smiled and nursed her raised her glass –dark, spiced rum the colour of burnt amber that sat heavy on her tongue and burned all the way down- in a wordless toast. Even so, she said, "Oh, they're not so bad. You just have to find the right ones."

Life in the twenty-third century wasn't loads of fun, but there were little moments –like there, in Grigor's pub, an hour before opening- that made it tolerable.

"You've stopped fighting, I see." Grigor observed with keen, dark eyes. He was in an unusually good mood that day; the Russian was not normally quite so chatty. "I thought it helped?"

Dagmar nodded. At first, in the months after her untimely arrival, the twenty-first century woman had suppressed her grief and rage, had funnelled it into fighting and fencing and any other activity that would tire her out too much to feel. She still did some of those things –swam and ran and kept herself fit and strong beneath the stiff and formal clothes inflicted upon her by her profession- but the time for fighting was done. She'd done a number on herself that way –punch ups in bars that she won by sheer wit and the good sense to put her back to a corner, martial arts training without the safeties on; stupid, reckless things. Things that made her hurt physically so she could maybe stop hurting emotionally.

The one good thing her assigned counsellor had done was shake her out of that phase, short-lived as it was. Dagmar was thankful for that, in hindsight.

"I still train," She shrugged simply. "But I don't fight anymore -not just for the sake of fighting."

"And vould that be vhy you did not fight this Fox man?" Grigor asked narrow, perceptive eyes and a faint curl at the corner of his mouth that passed for a tiny smile. "Not fighting just to fight?"

Dagmar blinked. Grigor snorted. "Andorians like drinking and quiet, but sometimes, vhen moon is blue, they talk." A shrug, then –"Moon must be wery blue, though."

She snorted, and left the question unanswered; nothing needed to be said.


The contrast between her apartment and the Andorian compound was like night and day. Where the compound had been filled with colours (often in combinations that clashed violently individually but worked together as a whole; the symbolism was not lost on her) her apartment was filled with stark shades of grey and neutral beiges. Where tapestries and bright draperies had hung around in near blinding oranges, greens, and yellows, her curtains were somewhat less than exciting –a brownish beige that differed so little from the carpet and the furniture that her mind seemed to glaze over it most of the time.

Almost as soon as she walked in that evening, Dagmar was sick of the place.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to go to Andoria with Thelen and Shral.