TWENTY-SEVEN: Reparation

The Embassy wasn't too terribly far from Laibok's central core and was, accordingly, near several medical facilities. A handful were in walking distance, so Dagmar simple picked one and started moving.

"I believe-" Shral began suddenly.

But Dagmar wasn't interested in conversation anymore.

"Please don't. I'm just too tired." She interrupted tiredly, feeling the breach of conduct in the reflexive cringe that followed, but not having the heart to care. She felt old and tired – the way she always did when she cried like that.

The aide didn't try to speak to her again and Dagmar endured the rest of the walk in silence, but one didn't have to be Human to notice the sadness that hung over the translator. Shral frowned, but said nothing – instinct and ingrained cultural customs told him to leave the red-haired female be. There was a kind of fragility there, something he had mistakenly triggered, which left him unbalanced. Andorian females were not fragile. They hid their sadness and weaknesses behind aggression and duty. This female wore them openly, like a banner on some ancient Human crusade; an open, weeping wound that never closed, never ceased to bleed.

It… fascinated him, on multiple levels. Not the grief or the sadness in and of themselves –never that- but the fact that the translator made no real attempt to hide it. Was that somehow stronger? It made him wonder if the hard veneer of Andorian women was really just a form of brittleness.

Foolish, idle, alien thoughts – but he had them all the same.

Andorians wanted strong bond-mates – spouses upon whom they can rely for protection and support. In Andoria's harsh and unforgiving environment, the weak are undesirable. Shral was one of the strong, and had accordingly always expected to find at least one bond-mate within the Imperial Guard, if not all three. That he would see so much potential in a civilian, an alien whose manner and customs were as foreign to him as his were to her… It puzzled him. Dagmar was not strong. She did not bear arms with soldiers, nor was she skilled in armed combat, but there was steel behind the sorrow – a proud, straight spine and a steady hand. Anything else, and she would never have survived long enough to make it to Andoria.

No, Dagmar was did not have what an Andorian would call strength.

Her strength was Human.

She knew where the facility was – had been put through a sort of routine check-up there recently, with terse doctors who were only just completing their studies of Human physiology. The entire thing had made her miss Dr. Phlox and his Tribbles.

A thin-faced Andorian male with kind sort of disposition one usually found in a wet cat took her file and waved her into a side room. "What is the problem?"

Dagmar followed the physician wordlessly until she had entered the side room and the door – a necessary breach of normal Andorian customs in a medical facility- and then simply said, "I felt unwell earlier today and found it necessary to temporarily leave my post. Ambassador Thoris ordered me to report to a physician in order to ascertain that the spell was nothing serious."

The physician nodded, expressionless and antennae inclined slightly to indicate polite interest only, as he withdrew a handheld scanning device. "Remain still."

The room was cold, sterile, shaded in greys and faint white-blues, with too-bright lights and sharp edges everywhere. Andorian clinics were nothing like Human ones. God, she missed Phlox.

The scanner warbled for a long while, needing to be calibrated to scanning a Human before anything could be accomplished. It gave Dagmar time to think – to consider the events in Ambassador Thoris' office. She wondered, belatedly, if she had somehow misinterpreted something, or if she had overacted. The thought made her uncomfortable. What if she'd made another mistake? Oh, god, not another mistake… Insecurity and doubt seeped in under the shadow of some fluttering anxiety in her belly. It gnawed at her like some wasting disease, ate away at her surety and confidence and, yes, that faint, self-righteous anger born of feeling wronged and hurt.

After a moment the machine chirped, suddenly, loudly, and Dagmar startled. The Andorian physician said gave her a quizzical look and then offered dismissively, "Your vitals are normal. I do not detect any anomalies, parasites, viruses, or foreign bacteria."

The blue-eyed Human nodded, and left, a troubled mood coming over her as she returned to the waiting room. There were very few occupants – it was not customary for Andorians to linger in such a place as Humans might. Andorians rarely fell ill, battle-injuries aside, and when they did they would deny it and put off seeing a physician until their illness left them incapacitated. After that, they were just violent, foul-tempered, and unlikely to cooperate with much of anything.

A cooperative, completely calm Human female showing up under her own power was something of a novelty for most Andorian doctors.

Shral was waiting for her, hovering just outside of the clinic. When she exited the building and stepped out onto the steet, his antennae perked upwards and towards her –not quite assuming their usual position of pointed attentiveness, but close- and he shifted to face her fully. Verdant eyes gave her a brisk, all-business kind of once-over.

After a long moment, Shral asked in his low baritone, "You are well?"

Dagmar nodded, unable to take her eyes off of the aide as she wondered and felt a rising sense of shame. This Andorian – this man, regardless of species- had done so much for her. He'd been the one to push her credentials and her resume towards the Ambassador, had subtly guided her career and, yes, had even been a friend to her… And what had she repaid him with? Awkwardness, random bouts of sobbing, misunderstandings, and discomfort.

Yes, shame was a good word for what the redheaded translator felt in that moment – but it failed to describe the horrible, constricting feeling, like a stone in her heart, or the wave of regret that followed it.

"…I'm sorry." She breathed, suddenly and hurriedly, because it needed to be said and she wasn't brave enough to say it any slower. Because he deserved an apology. Because, goddamn it, she'd made a mistake, and no friendship was worth less than petty anger over a stupid misunderstanding.

It was with a slow, shaky breath that she forced herself to continue – the fight against her natural flight instincts an uphill struggle. "I reacted pretty badly earlier, and I'm sorry. You didn't deserve any of that, or anything else I've done, and I'm so, so sorry. You've been a good friend, and you've helped me so much… "

Lamely, Dagmar trailed off, not knowing what else to say...

Shral – Vilashral- could have reacted in any number of ways. He could have been offended, or even placated. He could have pitched a fit about how ungrateful she was –and she had been- or perhaps preached about her inability to understand the finer points of Andorian society. He could have turned around and walked away without so much as another word, if he had so wished, and Dagmar would not have stopped him. But he didn't. He didn't do any of those things at all.

Instead, Shral simply raised a hand, palm facing outwards, and waited.

Dagmar's eyes stung, moved by an act of affection she wasn't sure she deserved, and the redheaded Human raised her hand to press her palm to his in the Andorian custom. The gesture felt almost natural, despite how rarely she performed the movement.

This time, in a strange parody of that night on the transport ship so very long ago, it was Shral's fingers which slipped through hers, and it was he who inclined his head. He did not rest his head upon her shoulder, as she had once done with him, but the calloused finger tips of his free hand brushed the outside of her arm lightly. A trail of goose-bumps followed in their wake, under the fabric of her jacket, as Shral offered a faint, thin Human smile under a calf-eyed Andorian one.

The world went strangely still in that moment, that tiny space of time in the all but deserted waiting room of a cold and severe Andorian clinic. Suddenly, the background of the world didn't seem very interesting; if someone asked Dagmar, later, what colour building next to her was, she would only remember verdant green eyes and a slow, quiet moment of calm.

Call it cliché and stupid, but that single moment gave her more peace than every single one of her bar fights and meditations and drinking binges put together had ever done.


Several meters away, well out of sight (not that the pair was paying much attention) the Andorian Ambassador to Earth and Tellar bowed his antennae together and shook his head as he observed the scene. It was good to learn that his translator was not ill, but it was vastly better to learn that whatever foolishness has occurred while he had been away was already repaired.

Thoris remembered many such moments like the one he was witnessing, and it was nostalgia, not any sense of privacy, which drove the Andorian male to leave the scene and return to his clan's Lodge; through their bond, on the other side of the city, Thoris' mates shared a quiet, telepathic sigh as they, too, were prompted to remember.