It was early when Vilashral th'Hrisvalar -Shral to a very select few- reached the abode of Andoria's sole Human inhabitant. He suspected Dagmar did not realise it, but her home had been positioned very deliberately in a nexus of sorts; well-patrolled, close to the Embassy and the Guild centres, and well away from some of the less reputable areas of Laibok. While her quarters could not compare to the intricately carved ice caverns of traditional Andorian clan grounds, it was well-secured – and easily monitored. He'd noticed as much during his initial briefing regarding their resident Human, and had not had cause to revise his opinion during his few subsequent visits.
Ambassador Thoris had, it seemed, given the location some thought prior to commissioning the space.
Shral indicated his presence and desire to enter through the panel to the immediate right of the door, and waited for acknowledgement with his hands clasped loosely behind his back. Almost habitually, he swivelled his antennae to give himself a reading of his immediate surroundings, finding nothing untoward after a few moments' surveillance. The light cycle for the day had not yet fully begun, and the city was still quite dark, the sounds of its inhabitants muted and distant. Early enough, perhaps, that the one he wished to see was likely still sleeping. It was a small matter; he knew she had deliberately programmed what she referred to as a 'door chime' to be alarmingly loud during her sleeping hours, so as to ensure she awoke to greet any visitors.
It was… considerate, given her species' greater need for sleep.
Even so early in the morning, the air was becoming almost humid by Andorian standards, the cold penetrating deeper past his off-duty clothing's layers than in the weeks before. It was the beginning of the spring season; unlike on Earth, however, its arrival was not to be celebrated. Spring was a time of dangerous thaws and treachery, of watchful adults and cautious children, because the unwary often lost offspring, siblings, and spouses.
Despite his best efforts, his antennae flicked in agitation. He could, he mused, blame the feeling upon the turning of the season; truthfully, the coming of spring made many Andorians uneasy, for very good reason. It was to Andorians what winter was reputed to be to Humans; a time of death. Yet to do so, to make use of such an excuse, felt childish.
Perhaps he was not the kindest man, or even the most personable, but Shral was nothing if not brutally honest with himself – especially when he could not be honest with others.
He had researched the thing that had brought Dagmar to seek his aid, discreetly. He had, with little difficulty, found the data that the Terran peoples had blithely made public with little concern for the taboos of others – and then immediately deleted all records of the data from his personal devices. He was not squeamish by nature, was largely unaffected by blood spilled in violence or by necessity, and had learned in his career to operate above taboos for the preservation of Andoria and her people. Even so, he found himself perturbed - not by the medical procedure itself, though it certainly had some macabre elements to it. Rather more disturbing than the breach of the taboo itself was the fact that Dagmar had undergone the process willingly.
Without hesitation, even.
Clan-mates, keth, would endure much for their own flesh and blood. Siblings and parents would make any sacrifice to ensure the well-being of their own, and even the most distant of cousins would feel obligated to assist each other in some way, even a small one. That was what keth meant, what it was and what it had always been; to endure, to sacrifice for others, to protect the greater whole. Clan Hrisvalar was no different in that respect than any other, whatever their reputation might otherwise be.
Dagmar had no relation to the Vulcan scholar she called a mentor, and less than no obligation to the female who had mated him. Not by Andorian standards, at least – but nevertheless, she had done this thing, this thing which frightened her, which pained her daily.
And it had pained her.
Yet that was not the reason for his agitation.
He had contacted her, had asked after health and sought information regarding her needs. After their last conversation, he had anticipated being called upon, and he had been willing to answer – was still willing, even if it felt like some strange parody of their usual dynamics.
Instead, he received only the most negligible of answers and little more than a vague and unnecessary reassurance for his efforts when he pressed for more detail. She had not contacted him since, and he had remained restless throughout the night. It was the feeling of a task left undone, an obligation left unfulfilled.
There was no obligation of course; no task that he had been meant to accomplish or arrangement made between them barring some nebulously phrased 'emergency'. There was no reason for his restlessness beyond the simple fact that he had expected to be called upon and had not been.
Now he found himself here, boldly in breach of Andorian norms.
How strange, he thought. How strange, to reach instead of being reached for.
It was a long moment before the lock released with a soft, pressurised hiss and the door slid open. The figure on the other side was dressed in loose sleeping attire, simple whites and greys with little ornamentation. She had wrapped a heavy shawl dyed a soft blue about her shoulders over rumpled sleepwear, but it was little more than a token effort against the cold, and probably more related to her Human notions of modesty than anything else. It was the same colour as her eyes.
"Shral?" She murmured – mumbled, really- sounding surprised. Her strange red hair was mussed, strands escaping from the loose braid it had been twisted into. She looked, to use a Terran phrase, as if she had just rolled out of bed mere moments before. It was strangely charming.
"Dagmar." Shral greeted simply. He thought she might ask why he was there, what his purpose was. He knew his arrival was unexpected, that she had likely not anticipated seeing any of her comrades for a few more days while the social stigma faded. She did not. Instead she hummed and stepped aside, inviting without inviting in her strange Human way, wordless and foreign.
The door slid shut behind him almost soundlessly, and the chill of the spring thaw disappeared behind it. Shral catalogued her appearance clinically as he stepped beyond the threshold into the artificial warmth of her home. The shift in temperature was something he noted absent-mindedly, much in the same way he noted the number of exits and entrances in any given room – useful information, but not immediately relevant.
With narrowed eyes, he noted that she seemed paler than usual, though with her peculiar complexion it was difficult to tell at first glance. A closer look proved more conclusive: her lips were paler in colour than usual, lacking much of their rosy, alien colour, and her face seemed drawn, as if greatly fatigued. He could see on the side of her neck the faint reddish mark where a hypospray had been used. Doubtless, she had self-medicated very recently, since the mark had not yet faded. Her movements were stiff as she yielded space in response to his approach.
"Hey," Dagmar murmured tiredly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes with her off-hand. She raised her other hand in greeting, palm outwards and fingers slightly spread in expectation; despite himself, his antennae bowed in amusement. The variation to the traditional greeting was now cemented, it seemed, in the Human woman's memory. "Is everything okay?"
"There is no cause for concern." He assured simply, bringing his own hand up to meet hers.
The slide of her warm palm, of slim fingers slipping between his own, inexplicably soothed some of his restlessness. The temperature difference was pleasant, despite the initial strangeness - increasingly so as time passed.
He wondered, not for the first time, what it might be like to experience such heat in more intimate circumstances, if he'd enjoy the warmth of her in comparison to that of an Andorian. He wondered if she would enjoy him, if their many physical similarities lent themselves to compatibility, if-
-Ah, but those were idle, unproductive musings, and not what he had come for.
He had not yet released her hand.
Dagmar's mouth curved into a small Human smile, apparently having noticed as well. Shral relaxed his hold, and made no comment when she was just as slow to remove her hand from his.
"Come and make yourself comfortable." She invited, tilting her head in the direction of her kitchen. "I'm about to make some breakfast - would you like some?"
Almost as soon as she let go of his hand, Dagmar found herself wishing she hadn't. There was comfort in the gesture, in the feel of cooler skin pressed against her own, and the curl of his fingers over hers. It reminded her, foolishly, (fondly) of holding hands - the way Humans meant it. She wondered if maybe she should tell Shral that. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the subject.
Later, she decided. Food first, cultural comparisons later.
Dagmar tugged the shawl a little closer around her shoulders as she moved to the kitchen, relieved to find her movements were less tender today. It had done her a world of good, to sit in a hot bath and get some solid rest in. The hyprospray she'd injected on her way to the door had already started to kick in, and it helped a great deal in taking the edge off of the lingering pain.
More importantly, and to Dagmar's immense relief, the bleeding had stopped sometime during her sleep. It was one less thing to worry about, at least. She'd check in with a nurse if it started up again, but from everything she had read, she should be fine.
She began to move about the kitchen with absent-minded familiarity, grabbing ingredients and tools as she went. Slowly but surely, Thelen had managed to teach her how to make several simple Andorian meals, and was gradually forcing her to learn how not to butcher the more complex ones. It was a good skill to have, particularly given the customs revolving around food and hospitality that Andorians held so dear. Truly, Dagmar thought as she set to work and got some katheka brewing, Thelen was a lifesaver a hundred times over by now.
Shral seemed to be content to let her work in silence, taking a seat at the nearby dining nook and quietly observing her. The nook itself was set into the wall, C-shaped like a booth with a little table. She didn't use it often, mostly when she had a guest over like Thelen, and its round table was the home of the lonely little vithi plant she'd been gifted with so many months ago. Shral looked different outside of his uniform, wearing a fitted wide-necked tunic and breeches tucked into boots, all in dark colours, accented with small traces of bright embroidery along the collar and hem of his tunic. She was amused to find that his civilian clothes looked very much like they were as close to his uniform as he could reasonably get, like the bright yellow threads of embroidery were the sole concession he was willing to make to the Andorian colour palette. It probably shouldn't have been endearing, but it was.
Now Dagmar was many things, but she wasn't completely oblivious. She had noticed the once-over she'd been given almost as soon as she'd opened the door, had felt the clinical gaze like a physical thing - and had allowed it. Shral wouldn't ask her directly about her health, and she probably wasn't supposed to tell him anything without being prompted; it was easier for both of them to just let Shral assess her condition without words.
At length, breakfast was served. It was a simple affair of cold-smoked meats on lightly fried flat-breads, made fragrant with what was apparently a traditional blend of Andorian spices. The flatbread was accompanied by thin slices of roasted tubers which tasted like buttery baked potatoes, came in colours that reminded Dagmar of Fruit Loops, and had the rough, fibrous texture of yellow turnips. The finishing touch -which Thelen had insisted she always, always make no matter what- was a thick and aromatic dipping sauce that had the same sharp tang of vinegar and Dijon mustard and something oddly musky.
Dagmar served them both, as per the traditional requirements that Thelen had painstakingly drilled into her brain, and she and Shral ate in companionable silence. It was… nice, even a little like the evenings she spent with Thelen comparing holovids and literature. Soothing was perhaps the more accurate word.
When their plates were emptied and they were both left nursing warm, steaming mugs of katheka, Dagmar remembered her earlier observation.
"I was thinking," Dagmar began, only to abruptly falter. "About the –oh. I don't know if it has a name."
Shral made an inquisitive sound, gazing at her steadily from over the rim of his mug. Once again, Dagmar was struck by the sheer vibrancy of the green in his eyes – was as startled and fascinated as she had been the first time she had seen them, so bright against the blue of his skin and the stark white of his hair.
"The…" Dagmar wasn't sure how to describe the motion, how best to explain, so she simply held her hand out again, palm towards him, and said, "This."
Shral offered a razor-thin smile, and his eyes seemed to grow softer for a moment as he set down his katheka and almost indulgently entangled their fingers. Sitting across the table as they were, drinking the Andorian equivalent of coffee, the gesture felt even more like Human hand-holding – felt, for that matter, more intimate. It raised goose-bumps down the length of her arms, a frisson like a tiny electric current.
"Phiithza." He pronounced the word slowly, carefully, letting her hear the precise sounds needed for each syllable. For emphasis, he squeezed her hand gently and reiterated, "This is phiithza."
Trust-symbol, Dagmar immediately translated, her mind already leaping to root words and variations in the different dialects she knew. An occupational hazard, she supposed wryly.
"Phiithza." She repeated, and smiled when Shral confirmed that her pronunciation was correct. With their precise sense of pitch, Andorians were particularly likely to notice the slightest mispronunciation; she was a little proud that she'd gotten the word right on her first try. "Thank you."
This time, Shral was the one who disengaged first. "And what were your thoughts on phiithza?"
"It reminds me of a Human thing." Dagmar continued her interrupted thought amicably, withdrawing her own hand to wrap them both around her mug. She let the heat seep into her fingers, and tried to resist the impulse to rub at goose-bumps along her arms. "We hold hands, sometimes, and sometimes it looks a lot like phiithza. It's not a greeting, and it's used differently, but it just struck me earlier how similar the two things are."
Shral made a motion with his hand, the one not cradling his own mug, gesturing for her to elaborate.
"Humans hold hands for lots of reasons," Dagmar obliged, pausing to collect her thoughts so she didn't end up rambling without direction. Andorians generally appreciated precise information, rather than haphazard snippets. "There's all sorts of different cultural nuances, and there's a difference between holding hands with a family member and holding hands with someone you're not related to, but generally it's a sign of trust and… warm regard, I guess. Affection, quite often, or sometimes it's just that the person you're holding hands with makes you feel safe. Touching a person's hands or face isn't something Humans usually do with just anyone. Doing either without permission is incredibly invasive, and generally considered very rude. There are individual cultural differences, of course, but it's usually better to err on the side of caution with these things."
Well, it was mostly concise, Dagmar supposed ruefully. She had to keep correcting for her own cultural bias when she explained things, and it often left her adding little addendums instead of presenting everything neatly in one go. She probably needed to work on that a bit more.
Shral seemed to process that, settling back into his chair as his face fell curiously blank. Dagmar's gaze, almost involuntarily, flicked up to his antennae and found them slowly drifting back and forth – a sign of very deep thought. He seemed to be giving the notion a great deal more thought than Dagmar had expected, though she was certain there was nothing in her explanation that could have offended the Andorian.
At length, the Andorian shifted forwards, just slightly, and slowly said, "I would like to learn more of your customs."
Dagmar blinked in surprise, feeling her eyebrows creep upwards fractionally. She hadn't expected that. In fact, she'd fully anticipated that Shral would express some sentiment about interesting cultural similarities and leave it at that.
After a moment, she realised Shral was looking at her expectantly and she had yet to say anything.
"I… suppose?" She offered uncertainly, unsure of what exactly she was meant to say. Was she supposed to launch into an anthropological analysis of hand-holding, maybe a historical accounting for its place in different early civilizations? "I mean, it's not very different from phiithza. Really, the biggest differences are in context."
"Your explanation was sufficient," The Andorian aide spoke, soft and sibilant. Then, very carefully, he reached out with one hand and covered hers with katheka-warmed fingers. His antennae were directed at her again, curling forward from their thoughtful wavering. "That is not what I meant."
His eyes, verdant and bright, dropped from hers to look at their entwined hands as he threaded their fingers together. Something anxious fluttered within the cage of her ribs.
"Shral?" Dagmar gave voice to her uncertainty, feeling strangely alert. Not alarmed, just… aware in a way she wasn't, normally, of her breathing and the thrum of blood beneath her skin and the precise sensory input of heat and rough calluses and firm muscle and bone that was his hand on hers.
"You cannot add to the security I provide for myself." The Andorian stated after some consideration, slow and careful as his thumb brushed gently over the curve of the side of her hand and bumped over a knuckle. He seemed ponderous, considering, as his eyes flicked up to meet hers once more. "I am the stronger of us by far, and the better trained – but I find a calmness in you that I rarely find in myself. I concern myself with your affairs more than the customs of my people dictate that I should, and yet I often find I can pursue no other course. I have come to believe that there is a degree of… compatibility between us."
Dagmar stilled. She became aware of her expression in fractions, of the widening of her eyes and the tiniest rise of her brows in surprise. Next in her growing awareness came the parting of her lips, already moving to ask a question she hadn't even formulated in her own mind. Last was the slow, creeping flush of blood rushing to her cheeks. The slow, soft path tracing over the side of her hand felt suddenly like more. Her heart seemed to beat a little harder, a little faster, and her nerves were nearly singing with sensory input that made something flutter in her belly.
That was – that was incredibly forward for an Andorian, she thought, fumbling and stunned. Or maybe it wasn't? Maybe she was overthinking things, seeing something that wasn't there or reading too far into things like she had in the past?
As if he could see into her head, see the jumble of thoughts and doubts, he squeezed her hand - just once, just enough, and relaxed his hold until it was loose and light- and said, "Dagmar."
Dagmar.
It wasn't the utterance of the word itself, not the collection of sounds that her name was composed of, that made her pause. It wasn't even the carefully watchful eye contact, or the soft brush of callused fingertips over the back of her hand that did it. Even as her mind drew up schematics of fine facial musculature and the structure of alien vocal chords and the precise movements needed to make the correct sounds in the right combinations, it wasn't the sound of the two short syllables that served as her name that made her pause. It was the tone. It was the way the world went soft and still, and some of the loose pieces fell into place like vivid shards of glass are so carefully set into a mosaic. The little pieces she had been gathering all this time suddenly fit together and made a picture she could- at last- begin to understand.
After a long moment, she managed a quiet, stunned, "Oh."
Oh, she said because she had never realised. Oh, because she'd never thought about it, never wanted to overstep or misinterpret. Oh, because suddenly it all made sense. The words of caution about not understanding some nuances, back on the ship heading here to Andoria - the quiet frustration about her not being Andorian, of her failure to understand because of it. The almost uncharacteristically kind yielding to her strange Human needs, time and time again.
And then, with a wry smile and something fluttering desperately behind her sternum as she felt suddenly and inexplicably shy, Dagmar said, "I guess we might have a few things to talk about, huh?"
Shral's antennae curved in amusement briefly before settling back into their now-familiar pointed position. His fingers squeezed hers again before he withdrew and resumed drinking his katheka. The roughened pads of his fingers sliding over the back of her hand felt electric in a way it hadn't before.
"I believe we might." He agreed, calf-eyed, calm, and steady as always.
A strange feeling of giddiness flooded her veins, and Dagmar felt her smile widen into something broader, fuller, as she finally found the courage to say, "Is this the part where I finally ask what your antennae are trying to tell me?"
Shral paused, mid-sip. It was probably the closest she'd ever gotten to catching him by surprise, she realised with some humour. He swallowed and Dagmar found her eyes helplessly caught by the motion of his throat as he inquired, almost delicately, "Do you mean to tell me that you don't know?"
Dagmar bit her lip, acutely aware of how vibrant green eyes tracked the movement and lingered with what she was starting to realise was interest. She offered an awkward shrug-and-smile combo, confessing, "Well… no, not really. I always meant to ask someone, but by the time I'd built up enough rapport with someone to ask, it had been going on for ages and I was too embarrassed."
Shral, to his credit, didn't laugh at her - but his antennae bowed so much they were almost heart-shaped and he came as close to grinning as she'd ever seen an Andorian manage. His voice, when he spoke, was fond with exasperation. "Only you, Dagmar. Only you."
Flushing, the Human woman withdrew somewhat and grumbled a bit. "It never came up in any of my courses!"
The Andorian actually did give something suspiciously close to a rasping laugh then and reached out for her hand again. It was as if Shral couldn't quite stop himself from reaching for her, now that he had, and every time he broke contact he found himself looking for ways to initiate it once more. The realisation that she would permit this contact -encourage it, even, beyond a simple greeting- purely because it pleased them both was a strangely heady one. Now that he had breached social protocol once for her, he found it strangely easy to do it again.
Weaving their fingers together and grasping them firmly, he tugged her closer and was pleased when Dagmar came to him easily enough until they were sitting side-by-side instead of opposite one another. Her knee pressed against his as she turned her body towards him, twitched back almost on reflex, and then slowly, deliberately relaxed back against him. The movement had the feel of one testing boundaries, testing reactions; there was uncertainty there, so unlike an Andorian woman, and yet instead of being repelled by the lack of confidence he found that he was instead pleased when the nervous tension in the Human woman's frame eased moments later. Shral concluded that he had passed whatever test had been set, and pressed his own knee more firmly against hers in affirmation. Her breathing hitched, very slightly. A Human might not have heard it; an Andorian couldn't miss it.
Shral waited until she met his eyes again, looking up at him with her sunlight-on-glaciers blue eyes that had stunned him from the very first moment of their meeting. When she did meet his eyes once more, her face still flushed in alien hues on her high cheekbones, he bowed his head towards hers.
He wondered if she knew, or had ever known, how rare blue eyes were on Andoria - how desired. A blue-eyed Andorian, regardless of keth or caste, was spoiled for choice in playmates and often spouses as well for the simple fact of their prized rarity. Perhaps, he thought idly, he would tell her.
"Attraction," The ambassadorial aide offered in answer after a long moment, speaking more softly than he ever had before in the stillness of her quarters. Like this he could feel the heat radiating off of her, detect skin-warm pheromones and the soft fruit-floral notes of whatever she used to cleanse her hair. "They indicate attraction."
The gesture felt intimate, more so than it ever had before, and Dagmar wondered how she ever could have thought he was communicating anything else. More than that, though, was a quiet but growing sense of something like awe. How long had it been since she'd first witnessed the gesture, how many months? A year now? A little more? Dagmar couldn't think of a single memory in which his antennae hadn't been pointedly directed at her at some point, now that she thought about it. Even her earliest memory of him, of the brief interview before the job offer that had changed her life so dramatically, had ended with his antennae firmly focused on her.
"I find I am aware of you, always." Shral continued as Dagmar tried to process what over a year's worth of want must have felt like, want without words, without managing to bridge the divide between them.
Slowly, telegraphing the movement, he reached up with his free hand towards her face, pausing just a hair's breadth away from making contact, as though to trace the contours of her face. He watched her reaction, watched the way her pupils widened and her tongue flicked over her lips almost reflexively, and waited. His antennae had begun to slowly, almost mesmerizingly, sway and writhe - still firmly focused, fixated, on her.
As if from within a mental fog, Dagmar vaguely recalled that she had told him, mere minutes ago, that it was unspeakably rude to touch a Human's face without permission. He merely waited, perhaps as he had always done, on her and she… She wanted that, was seized by the sudden, powerful need to know what his skin felt like on hers, how the shape of his hand would curl against the shape of her face. The suddenness, the intensity of it, took her completely off guard. It set her heart racing and left her mouth dry.
Dagmar couldn't remember the last time she'd felt like there wasn't quite enough air in the room, like her heart was a trembling thing, like the tiniest gap between his hand and her skin was simultaneously something she hadn't even known she coveted and yet utterly unbearable. The warmth radiating from him was a little less than it might have been from a Human, but in that moment it felt like the sun. She felt her eyes dilate, felt her face warm even further, felt all the little hairs along her arms and the back of her neck stand on end.
She was, she realised with sudden clarity, actually very attracted to Shral and possibly had been for some time.
Had she always been drawn to Shral, and simply hadn't let herself think about it? How else could Dagmar explain, even to herself, how a thing she hadn't consciously considered to be a possibility suddenly became overwhelmingly important? Had she simply told herself that it wasn't possible, it wasn't returned, it wasn't feasible? Or had it been lurking in the back of her mind, all this time, waiting for her to put the pieces together?
Thinking back on it, Dagmar couldn't say for sure either way. She remembered thinking he was handsome, if strange, and she remembered lingering on the idea of Andorians -no, just this one, her mind jeered, this specific Andorian- in a tuxedo for a little too long to be called proper before. He had made her heart race and her mouth run dry, and at the time she'd chalked it up to anxiety, but what if it hadn't been just anxiety? She had certainly felt strongly enough about his companionship to be genuinely distressed at the potential loss of it - maybe too strongly? More strongly than she might have felt about Thelen, she could admit that much to herself. What did that make it, then, this mess of tangled up thoughts and feelings?
The silence of her apartment had never been so loud.
'Where will this lead?' she wondered silently as she watched him watch her, wondering if the fluttering in her belly was anxiety or excitement or both. 'Where will we go from here? What happens if it goes wrong?'
With her own free hand, fingers just faintly trembling for reasons she couldn't quite name in that moment, Dagmar reached up and so very, very carefully pressed her fingertips against the back of his hand. She closed the gap herself and marvelled at the comparatively cool press of him against her, wondering things she hadn't really allowed herself to ponder about before as he drew the pad of his thumb over the curve of her cheekbone. They were close enough that their breaths intermingled, tinged katheka bitter.
"I am, too," Dagmar heard herself say, rushed and inelegant. "Of you. You're very distracting."
Shral smiled his razor-sharp smile beneath his calf-eyed Andorian one, his antennae breaking from their slow swaying to curl in amusement for a moment. This close she could just faintly smell something warm and softly musky, something close to his skin beyond the katheka and the subtle, detergent-clean scent on his clothes, and the more overt scent of whatever product he used to keep his hair swept back from his face. It may have just been him, the natural scent of him, or maybe whatever it was that he used to bathe with. Whatever it was, there was something about it that made her want to lean in, to breathe deeply and imprint it upon her brain.
"Do you remember when I found you in the gardens?" Shral asked, and his voice was still as soft and sibilant as it had been before but now it carried an undercurrent to it that she struggled to identify for a long moment. A beat later, she realised it was a note of gravitas.
Dagmar remembered. In fact, she vividly remembered making a fool of herself over the whole thing and nearly ruining her entire relationship with Shral as a result of her own foolishness. It wasn't high on her list of memories she wanted to revisit in any detail.
Shral seemed to surmise as much from her following grimace. Still, he continued, "There have been moments, Dagmar, where I was more aware of you than I should have been, and I think you have experienced similar moments."
"But I don't-" Dagmar began to protest, only to abruptly remember something.
The ghost-sensation of cool fingers between hers; Shral's hand twitching again, fingers clenching and relaxing, from across the room.
"Wouldn't I notice?" Dagmar found herself arguing instead, almost helplessly.
Shral hummed, tracing the curve of her cheek as he turned her question over in his mind. At length, he said, "There is no data on this. Perhaps you might notice, or perhaps you might not. You may have even dismissed any information gleaned as a moment of intuition. It often begins thusly for Andorians."
A strange niggling sensation at the back of her mind - more and more persistent as the seconds slipped by, feeling a lot like intuition but at the same time nothing like it.
Dagmar felt floored, and she was sure her expression showed it plainly.
Cautiously, gingerly, the red-haired woman lowered her gaze to her lap and tested the thought out in her mind, as if probing a bruise for pain: 'I… possibly… have a telepathic mating bond with Shral.'
The thought made her belly flutter, made her chest clench up, made something warm and fizzy speed through her veins. It wasn't a constricting, caging thought, not like she'd expected it to be; it was somehow an exciting one. That had never happened before, Dagmar thought dumbly to herself.
She tried again, uncertain how it might change the results but feeling compelled to check again: 'I may have a telepathic mating bond with Shral.'
Her palms felt unaccountably sweaty. Her heart still skipped, her stomach still fluttered.
This was - this was a lot. It was such a huge change, maybe not sudden for him but it was practically a revelation for her. She didn't know where this thing between them was going, or if it even could go anywhere. She didn't know if they were compatible, really, in several rather important ways. Was this serious - or was it just play? Andorians did that, and there was nothing wrong with it only… only Dagmar didn't know if she could bear it if that was all this was.
All she could say was a rough, inelegant, "Oh."
All her words, all the languages she spoke - useless. All that education deserted her in the moment, leaving her feeling like a foolish little Human in a very big world. It made her feel small and shy, and more than a little anxious. Doubt crept in, the way it always had. What was she doing here? She didn't deserve something like this.
The cooler hand intertwined with hers squeezed, a sudden, short movement that eased as quickly as it started, and it came with an inexplicable feeling of admonishment that felt… odd, almost-foreign, like it wasn't quite hers. Because it was his, she realised, glancing up at him in surprise.
"Dagmar." Shral said, low and quiet, and there was an intensity in his gaze that pinned her to the spot. His hand had shifted sometime during her moment of contemplation to curl loosely around the side of her neck, his thumb resting against the line of her jaw as though he had been tracing along it just before.
"...Yes?" She answered with growing uncertainty, her brow furrowing.
"Don't doubt yourself."
That odd, almost-foreign feeling came and went again, like something just barely brushing against the furthest edges of her awareness too quickly for her to say what exactly was meant to be conveyed. Maybe it wasn't meant to convey anything except that it was there, that it was real.
"Is it permanent?" Dagmar wanted to know, suddenly terrified that she had somehow trapped him, had bound him up in something she didn't fully understand. She hardly knew anything about how Andorians bonded - she'd never needed to, for her job. She hardly knew anything about any kind of bonding, for that matter, beyond the bare minimum that her job required her to know for translations.
"Not at first." Shral was quick to answer. His expression was calm, and his antennae gave nothing away, but Dagmar would have sworn in any court that she felt the briefest, sharpest pang of something like disappointment. She couldn't tell if it was his or hers. "A fledgling bond is easily abandoned, if there is no desire to commit to it."
The idea left her feeling stricken, and Dagmar was sure at least that that feeling was all hers.
"I don't want that," She blurted out, and then, much less confidently, "...Do you?"
A flicker of something at the edges of her mind answered her first, a starburst of something bright. It was warm in a way that made her want to bask in it.
"I do not." Shral spoke a moment later, and Dagmar marvelled at how always, always, his steady manner eased something twisted up with anxiety inside her.
Silence fell between them, and Dagmar didn't know how to describe it beyond an odd sense of anticipation. The absence of speech made it hard not to hyperfocus on the feeling of his hands against her, on their shared breaths and the starburst-bright-warm thing hovering at the edge of her mindscape that slipped away from her when she tried to focus on it but eased back into place when she let it be.
"I don't really know what happens now," Dagmar confessed, uncomfortably vulnerable. Her fingers tightened around his wrist with her rising anxiety and he stilled. "And I'm not sure I can play, like your people do. I'm not sure it's in my nature."
Her voice cracked a little at the end there, and Dagmar felt irrationally embarrassed. She hated herself a little for not letting it slide, for not taking the chance to just let the moment be, let it bloom, when the questions were piling up inside her head. She wouldn't have been herself if she didn't speak up.
She wasn't good at this, wasn't good at talking about deeply personal things - not even back in her time, with her family or the few times she'd dated. It was hard to open up, like trying to pry open an oyster with her bare fingers, but even she knew that whatever this was, it wouldn't survive without real, open communication. She'd nearly ruined things with Shral too many times now to risk going without for the sake of her own comfort. If it left her feeling scraped open and raw, then so be it; she'd been flailing from one social disaster to the next for long enough to see that her usual go-tos just weren't working for her on Andoria.
To his credit, the Andorian seemed to pick up on something of her thoughts and he eased her forward until their brows were touching, stopping at just the lightest of presses. She could feel his antennae trailing, feather-light, over her hair; the sensation sent tiny little shivers down her spine and she inadvertently pressed closer.
"No, Dagmar," He murmured, and for a moment Dagmar forgot how to breathe, terrified that this at last was the rebuttal that she feared. His eyes never left hers as she struggled to control her expressions, fighting and failing to hide the dismay and already trying to pull away from him as something like shame welled up within her. He didn't let her go far, hardly more than a breath of space before he reeled her back in, drawing her slowly, gently, relentlessly close again. "Whatever this is, it is not just play - not with a bond involved."
"No?" She asked, unable to help the uncertainty, the almost desperate need for reassurance that coloured her voice.
"No." Shral confirmed, sweeping the pad of his thumb over the arch of her cheekbone in an almost exploratory touch. "Spontaneous bonds cannot form from nothing, vinzhuukh."
Dagmar's breath stuttered, shuddered, as her eyes finally slid shut. That was… that was a very profound endearment. She only knew what it was because a lot of modern Andorian literature featured it and she'd had to look it up once while reading on her day off a while back. It meant something like darling, or sweetheart, as best as she could decipher. It was most certainly not something to be used casually, from what she'd managed to determine.
She felt at once wound too tight and somehow a wreck of a human being; restricted yet sliding out of control with each inhalation, recovering and backsliding with each exhalation. How did other people bear this, this feeling of too much and not enough that felt ravenous and sated all at once? Was this what had been missing from all her failed past attempts at romance, from her lacklustre courtships cut short by disinterest and better things to be doing?
Taking a deep, faltering, fortifying breath, she opened her eyes once more and traced her gaze over the features of the Andorian before her. He really was handsome, in a sharp and narrow way that Andorians seemed to naturally favour. She'd noticed it before, but she'd never managed to be this close to him in quite this context before. It was different from when they'd been sleeping alongside one another, or piled together with Thelen and dozens of others on that transport ship.
"I'm not sure how Andorians go about this," she murmured, fighting down a flare up of sudden shyness born from her own nature. Huffing a laugh, soft and barely there enough to qualify, she further confessed, "This definitely wasn't in any of my courses."
Shral didn't laugh, but she thought she felt his antennae curling together for a long moment before they resumed their slow, swaying perusal of her hair. His smile widened fractionally, probably beginning to hit the limits of what his limited facial muscles could manage, and his eyes crinkled just the faintest bit, as amusement filtered through the heat in the back of her mind. Their noses brushed, a soft and light sort of contact that felt more intimate than their mingled breaths.
"I do not know how Humans go about this, either," the aide conceded, and she might have said his tone was easy but for the way that his eyes had darkened like hers and his breathing deepened.
Her breath hitched as long fingers swept along her jaw, past her ear, and wound into her hair. It was a struggle not to let her eyes flutter shut again, not to lean into the touch any more than she already had. Shral hummed thoughtfully, curling his fingers close to her scalp to try to draw another small sound forth. Dagmar, quite involuntarily, rewarded his efforts with a sigh.
When the red-headed woman shifted the hand about his wrist to brush her fingers tentatively along the smooth brushed-textured fabric covering his arm to the crook of his elbow Dagmar could have sworn she heard his breathing change, just fractionally. Not quite enough to call it a hitch or a stutter, but enough that she could imagine what it might sound like. She felt herself grow warmer at the thought as no small amount of blood seemed to redirect itself in a southerly direction.
Still, she needed to be sure. Dagmar couldn't afford to be irresponsible about this - not with a coworker, not with Shral. "Are you sure this is something you want? With me? We're very different. I would understand if-"
"Yes." He cut her off, fierce in a way that made her shift in her seat, torn between the conflicting impulses to flee from the intensity of his gaze and the desire to draw closer yet. The starburst of warmth and light at the back of her mind was a near-burning thing, now, incandescent and radiating. "I know the sound of your heartbeat, the scent of your pheromones, the precise steps in your gait; I could find you in a crowd of thousands. If not you, then no one."
Spirits, she thought faintly as she stared up at him, momentarily overwhelmed. He was making it very hard to be responsible about this.
Dagmar did her level best to persevere. "What about your family? They wouldn't object?"
His brow pressed a little more firmly against hers, and when he spoke it was with that same ferocity, carefully controlled, thrumming alongside starburst-heat and light. "I am a lesser son of a large clan; a few individuals would expect to be notified of any significant developments, of course, but the Clan leaders would care little for my personal affairs so long as I do not bring dishonour to the blood of Hrisvalar. There have been non-Andorian bondmates in Andoria's history, though admittedly very few. There is a precedent."
Something in Dagmar's shoulders unclenched then, with relief. Family had always been something desperately important to her, for all that there were a thousand things she wished she could have said to her own family; the idea of doing something, anything, that would put Shral in conflict with his own Clan bothered her immensely. Family was sacred in a way that few other things were. It was bad enough that she was alone - she didn't want to be the cause of anyone else's estrangement.
"I can feel your relief." Shral breathed, low and soft and sibilant. "Barely, but it's there."
Licking her lips, nearly forgetting how to speak when his eyes dropped down to track the movement, Dagmar asked in a whisper, "What else can you feel from me?"
"Nerves." He answered immediately, followed by a slower, much more considering observation of, "Excitement. Heat."
Shral's hand curled further into her hair, slowly, until the faint tug became a calculated pull that sent something electric blazing down her spine, and Dagmar would deny the sound she made then until her dying day. It was a faint, trapped thing at the back of her throat that could have been a moan. It didn't matter that it never quite escaped; Shral had disentangled his hands from her and seized her by the hips before the sound had fully died away and drew out a gasp instead.
Dagmar found herself dragged across the gap between them until her knees parted on either side of his thighs and she found herself perched in the slim space between the edge of her table and the hard planes of his body. She was suddenly, acutely, aware of herself, of the hot flush on her face and the hitch in her breathing and the growing arousal dampening the space between her legs. The upholstery creaked beneath her knees as she settled. The muscles beneath her were firm, strong, and the feel of them between the wide part of hers made her blood burn.
Her newly freed hands had landed on his shoulders, bracing for support entirely without her consent, though one immediately had fled to clamp around the wrist of one hand at her hip- fingers wrapped tight with surprise, but not trying to dislodge his hold. His brow had never left hers, pressing hard against her with the same fervency that a Human might have kissed her, and his antennae writhed.
Hesitantly, slowly, equal parts exhilarated and terrified, Dagmar moved the hand at Shral's shoulder to hover near his face. His antennae twitched, just a little, as his eyes flicked to the side to track the movement, before the unrestricted hand at her hip came up to repeat the very thing she had done earlier when presented with the same request; he pressed her hand to him, wordless and tacit, and did not even try to hide the soft shudder that rolled through him as she traced the harsh contours of his face. She would have felt it anyway, if he had; it felt like there were no secrets when they were this close.
She traced her fingertips over the high plane of his cheekbone, sweeping backwards to his hairline and then down along the sharp line of his jaw. He didn't quite have pulse points the way she did, having a vastly different circulatory system, but even so she thought she could feel the drumming of blood beneath her fingers at the soft space behind the corner of his jaw. His pulse seemed to match hers almost beat for beat. His hand stayed around her wrist as she explored the planes of his face, fingertips curled to feel the fluttering of her pulse and the soft skin of her wrist. He seemed content to let her do as she willed, neither guiding nor restricting her movements, though she noticed the hand that still curved around her hip tensing, just a little, when she brushed against his hairline just above his temple.
An instinct was clamouring for attention, drawing her focus down to his mouth and the space between his and hers, and her fingers paused there, against the hard line of his jaw, brushing the pad of her thumb over the corner of his lips. His lips were thin, a shade or so darker than the rest of his skin, and behind them she knew she would find sharp teeth; the impulse, the desire, to lean just a little closer to press herself against him was a powerful one. She traced his lower lip cautiously, waiting and watching through heavy-lidded eyes for some sign of discomfort as his lips parted. If anything, she felt she could sense a kind of curiosity when she dragged her eyes back up to meet his.
"Humans kiss," She murmured, feeling breathless, feeling dizzy with it as she angled her head to brush noses once more. Her breasts brushed against his tunic with every breath, the space between them reduced to nearly nothing. "Do Andorians?"
Shral angled his face to match hers, and spoke nearly against her own lips when he commanded, "Show me."
From there it was hardly any effort at all to lean close, to press her lips against his slowly, cautiously. It was a soft, tentative thing, a light press against flesh cooler and less yielding than her own.
Very quickly Dagmar realised he wasn't responding. Dagmar felt her heart sink as she drew back, searching his expression for some sign of what the problem was. Was this not okay? Was it too strange? Was it awful?
"Is that all?" Shral's antennae were still swaying, writhing slowly, only able to just brush against her from this new angle, but his expression was otherwise largely unchanged. He didn't seem affected, or maybe she just didn't know how to read an Andorian in this sort of situation. The uncertainty gnawed at her.
"Well, no," Dagmar began tremulously, feeling her flush darken with something sharp like embarrassment in her belly. She licked her lips nervously. "There's more to it than that, I just-"
His hand uncurled from her wrist to trace the curve of her arm up to the column of her throat, brushing along the blood vessels thrumming beneath her skin and following them up to slide over the curve of her jaw much like she had done to him. There was an intensity in his gaze that made her trail off abruptly, and she found her lips parting when he experimentally pressed the pad of his thumb against the soft and yielding flesh of her lower lip. Purely on reflex, her tongue flicked out and grazed against him; his pupils blew wide enough to reduce the irises to the thinnest rings of vibrant green.
The hand at her hip swept up along her side to join the other in framing her face, fingers tangling back into her hair as he pulled her towards him. Once more, he commanded, "Show me."
It seemed like it was the most natural thing in the world, then, to slide her newly unoccupied hand around the back of his neck and urge him without words to follow her lead.
This time, he met her part way as she used her now unoccupied hand to brace against the back of the booth-like seat, to stop herself from tumbling forwards with the drunk, graceless feeling she felt coming over herself. This time, when she pressed her lip against his, he moved with her. Not much, not with the same range of motion, but he did and Dagmar realised with abrupt chagrin that it maybe wasn't a matter of not enjoying the act so much as it was a matter of simply not being able to replicate the same movements she was making.
She felt stupid, for a very brief moment; this was something Dagmar should have remembered, something she'd remarked upon plenty of times before. Andorians had limited facial fascia, she reminded herself, followed immediately in her mind with diagrams from her xenolinguistics courses - but lips were only one part of the equation here.
She parted her lips against his and traced her tongue lightly over the seam of his mouth, thrilling in the sweet shock of his sudden inhalation and the cautious parting of lips beneath her soft entreatment. The frisson of heat that shivered down her spine urged her to press closer as her fingers wound into his hair and she scraped her fingernails ever-so-lightly against his scalp. When she was rewarded with the first taste of his tongue, of the salt-mild and katheka-bitter taste of him layered with something so alien to her that she couldn't identify it, the softest of sounds slipped free from her and she knew he heard it by the shudder that worked its way through him. When she goaded him with a teasing flick of her tongue just past the sharp barricade of his teeth, he chased after her, and she was relieved that this, at least, was easier between them. She felt it in the way his antennae writhed against her hair and the grip of his fingers against her skin, in the way she felt heat building, sinking, settling into the cradle of her hips.
Dimly, as if from very far away, she was aware that her breasts were still tender and protested pressing up against the hard lines of him with each breath, just as she was aware that the soft space between her legs was still very sore, almost as if to spite her for the flood of heat there. In the moment, they seemed like details far too unimportant to matter compared to the feel of him, to the way scent and taste and texture overrode all other senses until there was only a growing urgency to press even closer.
The press and pull, the give and take between them seemed to grow more intense, teeth scraping and tongues sliding against one another with a kind of slow deliberation that made her blood burn as hands on both sides began to wander. She traced the lines of his throat and shoulders as he smoothed broad, long-fingered hands along the length of her spine. The planes of his chest were firm under the tunic beneath her hands as his found her hips and dragged her forwards even as he leaned back against the wall of the dining nook, pulling a surprised sound from her. Even the brief, momentary pause that followed to assess if she was protesting or just startled did not detract from their exchange.
"Are you-" Shral began, pulling away the barest amount to look over her face for some sign of distress in much the same way she had before. His antennae had straightened into alertness.
"I'll tell you if something's not okay," Dagmar interrupted breathlessly, half impatience and half reassurance as she surged back against him and set her teeth against the swell of his lower lip to drag out something like a moan from him. She hummed in approval, feeling his hands grip her hips and imagining already the strength of them, the way his grip would leave bruises on her in the best kind of way.
There was a sense of momentum here, of building slowly but surely up to something, though Dagmar couldn't say what that something was with any certainty - only that she wanted it, and he wanted it, and everything else could wait.
Experimentally, she rolled her hips, not bothering to stifle the sharp inhalation that followed when she felt herself grind upon something long and hard at the apex of his thighs, something that most certainly wasn't there under less intimate circumstances according to her fuzzy memories of Andorian biology. The motion drew a sound from Shral that was almost wounded as he bucked upwards against her and she clenched-
"Ah, fuck!" Dagmar broke off suddenly with a hiss as pain flared, one hand darting to press ineffectively over her lower belly. The lingering effects of her procedure were back with a vengeance, and while the pain wasn't sharp or otherwise worrisome it was deep, and the location of the pain was more of a shock than the quality of it - dull like pulled muscles and the sharp prick of more localised pain all at once.
Shral immediately froze, his grip on her slackening as he withdrew with an alarmed stiffness to his antennae.
"What is it?" He demanded, eyes flitting over her form to find the source of the problem. He wouldn't find anything external, of course.
Dagmar grimaced, feeling the heat that had been building up between them start to dissipate. Almost apologetically, she mumbled a plaintive, "I'm still a bit sore."
Easing away a bit to let her settle back, Shral regarded her carefully, his antennae no longer writhing as they had been but sweeping over her as if searching for something. His skin had been flushed a deeper, reddish-tinged blue moments before, heated like hers but now was rapidly cooling to its usual shade. Cautiously, he said, "That seemed a little more than sore."
Dagmar pressed her lips together, feeling awkward and cold and abruptly aware that her shawl had slipped from her shoulders and pooled somewhere down by Shral's boots at some point, leaving her aware of the very visible pebbling of her nipples through her nightshirt and the cooling dampness between her legs. His hands shifted away from her hips to settle on her waist, drawing soft circles above the sharp edge of the flare of her hips with his thumbs. Their breathing started to even out, slowing in little increments.
"I'm okay, I'm just not… I'm not recovered yet." She eventually revealed, when Shral's gaze settled on hers with a patient watchfulness she couldn't hope to outlast. The Human woman grimaced apologetically, "I don't want to make you uncomfortable with details."
Shral nodded, his expression shifting from alarm to more thoughtful as his antennae swayed very gently back and forth in her direction. She couldn't tell what he was thinking, precisely, but something told her it wasn't necessarily anything worrying. Was that her intuition, she wondered, or the barely-there bond? The starburst of heat at the back of her mind had cooled, but it was still there, steady and bright and warm.
After a few heartbeats, the aide leaned up and bowed his head towards her again. She met him without thinking, pressing her brow to his despite her lack of antennae as if she'd done it a thousand times. It felt different this time, calmer, as his antennae curled forwards to brush over her hair once again.
"To answer your earlier question," Shral spoke quietly. "This is how Andorians kiss."
Dagmar's smile was more apologetic than anything as she sighed with disappointment. "I'm sorry I can't reciprocate."
Shral bumped his nose against hers almost like a reprimand, shifting to press his lips to her jaw as he asked, "Does that upset you?"
Dagmar nodded, cautious of bumping against his antennae with too overt a motion, sighing softly when she felt the faintest press of sharp teeth against the underside of her jaw before Shral withdrew to look at her again.
"A little," Dagmar confessed, brow furrowing as she spoke. "I'm a little worried that there are going to be more things about us that don't… line up right, maybe? That there will be difficulties where compatibility is concerned, I mean. Not having antennae is a big one, I think."
Shral's antennae moved in a shallow bow towards one another before redirecting towards her once again, kind of like a shrug, as he reached up to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Perhaps, but it is not one that has ever detracted from your value. There will be difficulties, and incompatibilities, in this - but I think there will be far fewer than you are afraid of."
Dagmar hummed, feeling a little reassured. Shyly, she found herself asking, hesitantly, "What did you think about the Human version?"
"It was novel." Shral smiled an Andorian smile, calf-eyed and dark over the thin smirk of a Human one. His fingertips traced the shell of her ear, and he watched with interest as she shivered a little in response. "And mutually enjoyable - as I am sure you noticed."
She took her revenge by brushing her fingertips high up on his hairline, near the antennae but not touching them. His hands gripped her hard and pulled her sharply against him, drawing a squeak of surprise from her along the thrill of petty satisfaction she was sure he must have been able to feel from her. The muscles of his thighs tensed beneath her, and he very deliberately loosened his grip on her, one digit at a time, the starburst of the bond flaring with a wild heat before abruptly drawing in on itself until it was contracted down into a small, tightly contained flicker. He drew in a deep, controlled breath and stared at her with darkened eyes.
"Careful, vinzhuukh," Shral warned, low and rasping. "That is not a game you are ready to play in your condition."
Dagmar's hormones begged to differ; Dagmar's common sense, in a rare power move, overruled them. She withdrew her hand, and instead wove her arms behind his head, bowing her head towards his this time to initiate an Andorian kiss -something emotionally charged but otherwise tame for her and, she suspected, very fulfilling for him. Shral reciprocated immediately, pressing his brow firmly against hers and sweeping his antennae over her hair. The starburst-warmth remained as it had been, warm but controlled.
"What happens now?" Dagmar asked.
"Now," Shral answered. "We have a few things to talk about."
