Confessions (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 24 Mar 2017 @ 6:41pm by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Ensign Miraj Derani & Ensign Mimi

3,423 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Episode 14 - Statecraft
Location: IKS DuJa'Q - Forward Turbolift
Timeline: MD 06, 0650 hrs

[ON]

With the Sentinel out foxed and left in their wake several light years behind, Miraj was elated and smug, but had been at the Helm for over twelve hours without a break, and with an adrenalin comedown on its way, she'd been sent below for rest.

She had called the turbo lift at the ancient cabin had arrived and she stepped into it. "Deck Eight." The doors shut with a slight hesitation, and then descended down, but stopped sooner than expected.

The turbolift doors parted for Lirha on Deck 5 and creaked open. With her head down and just coming from Commander Ban's quarters, the Orion was anxious to return to her temporary apartment and rid herself of her cumbersome uniform. The encounter with Sentinel had been undesirable at best and treasonous at worst, and she still couldn't believe she'd fired on a Starfleet vessel. Unpleasant ponderings of the various types of court-martials she'd face when they returned to Earth consumed her thoughts but quickly vanished when she looked up and began to step forward.

She took sight of the pink-haired woman who was in the turbolift; the same woman who she'd had an eventful encounter with not more than a few days ago and who'd partially broken her heart. Her steps slowed with natural hesitation to enter the chamber with her, but Lirha forced herself to keep going and step inside. She didn't say a word but kept her eyes locked on Miraj for a long moment until she heard the door swish shut behind her and seal them inside of the lift.

Miraj's heart sunk. After her disastrous attempt to give the admiral what she thought the Orion wanted, she'd managed to dodge Lirha for the last four days. Even their time together on the bridge and been formal and poilite. She'd not wanted to encounter the Admiral in such confined conditions at all. Or unsupervised. But here, there was no place to hide. She was suddenly acutely aware of still being in her pyjamas from the scramble hours before. She carefully stared at the floor, not knowing what she should say, but hugged her arms around her a little tighter, defensive and full of nerves.

Lirha proceeded to step further inside the turbolift and towards the far wall. She then turned toward the closed door to face it, and clasped her gloved hands lightly behind her back. "Hello, Miraj," she said quietly and informally, not looking at the ensign directly but stealing a glance at her outfit out of the corner of her eye. The same one she'd defended in front of Chorag on the bridge several hours ago.

"Hello, ma'am." Miraj replied.

The silence hung between them, with more spikes than a whole desert of cacti. It made the air in the lift close and cloying. Miraj shifted from one foot to the other, wishing the lift would move quicker.

The general glanced up at the ceiling. Then to the wall on the left. Then to the floor. Then to the door. She had no idea what to say to Miraj or if she should even say anything at all. The awkwardness of their last encounter had hurt her beyond her imagination, and she had no desire to bring up old wounds.

Seconds passed. Long seconds with no words spoken. The tension in the air would probably have consumed them both if a disruptor ignited it. Lirha swallowed and sighed quietly, waiting for the lift to deposit her to her quarters.

And then something underneath them went crunch

Miraj reached out for the the wall of the lift. "What's wrong?" she asked DuJa'Q, forgetting she wasn't alone.

The turbolift had lurched and come to an unceremonious halt. While Lirha wasn't as familiar with the sounds and feels of the Klingon starship as she was with Starfleet's, her gut instinct told her something had malfunctioned. She frowned and stepped toward to small data panel on the inside of the lift then proceeded to tap several commands into it with her slender green fingers. Each entry produced an error code that was highlighted in bright red Klingon glyphs.

"The turbolift has malfunctioned," she told Miraj matter-of-factly.

Miraj realised she'd been caught talking to a ship again, and turned aside so Lirha' couldn't see her embarrassment. "I'm guessing pulling that slingshot knocked something loose." she frowned at the bulkhead, "Sorry." she told DuJa'Q. Her hand went to her chest, to call for help, but of course, she was still in her night clothes and the communicator wasn't there.

"Er, I don't have a comm badge." she admitted.

Lirha raised her hand to her sash and tapped the silver-and-gold Starfleet emblem pinned there. "Saalm to Operations," she began, "Ensign Derani and I are in the forward turbolift. It...seems to have malfunctioned. We are stuck."

Mimi's console chirped and Lirha's voice came over the comm system. =/\=Understood=/\= She worked her console through to a view of the turbolift system. =/\=Looks like you're stuck between decks 7 and 8. I'll run a diagnostic and come take a look. But it will take at least 10 minutes=/\=

Ten minutes, Lirha repeated in her head with a mental groan. While not normally a long period of time, she disliked being in confined areas with no way out. "Very well," she responded. Make it a priority."

The general turned to her ensign to relay the news, but also knew Miraj had heard the entire conversation over the comm. "I guess it is just you and me for time being," she said.

Oh good. Miraj tried not to let her discomfort show. "So it seems." She leant against the bulkhead, and then let herself slide down it until she was sitting on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest, and wrapped her arms round them. This could get more awkward, but she wasn't sure how. The silence dragged. "Will they try and follow us? Starfleet I mean." The Sentinel was in no position to follow, but the commander probably had a brain, and by breakfast tomorrow all of Starfleet would know something had been skulking under cloak in this area of space.

That same question had preoccupied Lirha's strategic planning for a good portion of the last hour. She knew their position had been compromised but also that Starfleet didn't have many starships in the vicinity. By the time a search group was organized, DuJa'Q would hopefully be out of range and undetectable. For Miraj's piece of mind and those of the rest of the crew, Lirha nodded but waved a hand dismissively to keep her from worrying. "Yes, but they have little information about our location and destination. Sentinel was not able to track our escape vector and now that we've sealed the anti-proton leak, we will be invisible to their sensors until we cross the Neutral Zone," she answered.

"Which won't be long." The sling shot had raised their velocity to a satisfactory Warp 9.5 Then it was only a few days to the Neutral Zone, and another week or so to Qo'noS. "Lets hope there's no more unpleasant surprises."

And then the conversation sagged again. Miraj felt the silence crushing her. Where was ops? Digging lint out of their navels? She was going to die of embarrassment before they got them out. Was humiliation poisoning a thing? Because she had a terminal case, she was sure.

Lirha agreed wholeheartedly with Derani's sentiment. The less trouble they encountered, the better. Getting through the Neutral Zone sensor nets on both sides of the border would be a task in and of itself -- to compound the difficult task even further would make it all but impossible, even with her knowledge of Starfleet access codes. She looked down at Miraj and gave her a small smile in reply.

Miraj saw the smile and wasn't sure what it meant. It was patently obvious that Miraj was terrible at interpreting what the admiral wanted and Lirha was hopeless at explaining. There was no way this wasn't going to go horribly wrong again. She groped for a safe topic of conversation. The rest of the crew? Maybe a bit too bitchy. The Klingons? Same problem. Not as if they could talk about the weather inside a giant tin can. "Shouldn't some one have tried to get us out by now?" Miraj went with their current predicament. "We can only be stuck between decks, can't they wedge the doors open?"

It had been less than two minutes since the call to Ops, and Lirha could sense the awkwardness in the turbolift with every fiber of her body. She didn't bother to respond to Miraj's question for it'd already been answered over the comm. Instead, she silently sighed while acknowledging to herself that the two of them needed to discuss what happened in her quarters four days ago. She couldn't bare any more of the ensign's forced small talk when they both knew what the problem was. "Miraj," she began, "I want to talk. About the other night in my quarters."

Miraj swallowed. She'd been afraid of that. There was no avoiding it though. The elephant was in the turbolift, and it was going to make a smell any second now... There was no avoiding it, she supposed. She just had to get it over with. "Yes, ma'am?"

"Please don't call me that...not after our time together," Lirha said with a disapproving shake of her head. She didn't speak with anger in her voice but rather frustration that the ensign kept seeing her as her superior officer even in regards to personal matters. "There's no need for rank to be mentioned. I just want to talk to you about my feelings. Our feelings."

Miraj felt more comfortable with the distance the rank provided, the whole experience had left her angry and confused and riddled with guilt, and she wanted the distance as another layer between the two of them. IT seems she wasn't going to get that though. "Alright," she said cautiously, "What did you want to talk about?"

Where to begin? So many things needed to be discussed. Prioritizing them was difficult but Lirha thought it best to interpret the way she felt to Miraj first and foremost. "I've been upset," she revealed, "ever since you left my quarters that night. I thought..we were sharing something between us, a connection. A shared version of love in all of its forms. But...then you told me you had only come to me as a means to get reinstated to duty," she said, her light green eyes now locked on Miraj's. "You used me to get what you wanted." The pain of saying that last sentence made Lirha grind her teeth as recent emotions started to flood through her again. "Why would you do that?"

Miraj's jaw fell open. She wasn't sure she'd heard correctly. How could the woman accuse Miraj of using her? How dare she? A wave of gut twisting anger washed over her. "You jumped on me! And when I said no you took away the thing that matters most to me!" Her voice was loud in the close confines of the turbo lift. "I didn't use you! You punished me for not putting out!"

Derani's outburst caught Lirha by surprise but also ignited a fire within her. Was that really how she'd interpreted the events? That she'd relieved her of duty simply for not 'putting out'? "I did no such thing," Lirha rebuked, her own voice raising a level. "I kissed you," she admitted, "but I did not remove you from duty because you wouldn't reciprocate. You were under duress and it was my professional opinion that you were not fit for duty until you could find a way to calm yourself!" Her head swirled, wondering exactly how the Ensign had come to that conclusion. Was it because she was an Orion? That the prevailing stereotype of her people was one of careless hedonistic pursuits?

Miraj blinked. She wondered how Lirah could not see that she was under duress because of the Orion's own actions? "You, kissed me!" she stressed. "You didn't ask. You didn't know me. I know Orions do things differently, but I'm human. Mostly. We get stressed when people touch us without permission! I was doing fine until that happened. I thought that was obvious."

"Doing fine?!" Lirha ground her teeth against each other. "You were not 'fine'! You are so on edge that even the touch of my hand on your arm made you recoil. Our starship was destroyed and you survived in an escape pod only to be taken back to Kreanus and held in captivity for three weeks. No one is 'fine' after that!" Lirha didn't know the details of what had happened during that short period, but was aware of the later happenings. "And then I heard about you and Ko'raH -- how he treated you..." Lirha's eyes turned down and toward the floor. It had broken her heart when Medara had told her of the encounter. Half of Kreanus had been talking about after they'd heard the gossip of the ensign leaving Ko'raH's quarters nude and disheveled.

The Orion looked back up at Miraj. "He hurt me as well. And I thought...you needed comfort," she tried to explain.

Ther were so many thoughts in Miraj's head she didn't know where to start. "You thought. You didn't ask. Of course I flinched. Like I said. You touched without asking. It was weird. I didn't know what to do." She hugged her knees tighter. "Yes, a lot of what happened on Kreanus was horrible, but not all of it. And I was, am, dealing with it. The way I deal with everything. I was flying again. It was glorious, and you took it away!" Miraj was aware she sounded about five years old, almost screaming, but she was too angry to really care. "I didn't need comfort, I needed to fly." I needed to be at a helm, I needed to sleep with the thrum of the engines under me, and I needed that bloody headache to go away. She lapsed into sullen silence, out of breath, and feeling drained. In that quiet, Lirha's last comment came to her. "What did he do to you? Beyond killing you and..." She trailed off, assuming the rest would be too painful for Lirha to hear.

The more Lirha listened, the more her anger grew. Miraj -- one of her senior officers and the conn controller responsible for the safe navigation of her entire crew -- was beginning to sound like a petulant child to her. Lirha's eyes flared and she stepped closer to Derani before speaking while bending down on her knees to bring her head closer to the other woman's. She spoke in a pointed yet forceful voice. "I'm sorry for kissing you. It was the wrong thing to do to you, and no, I didn't have your consent. I was...emotionally compromised at the time. What I did to you wasn't proper," she said with sincerity. "But you are a Starfleet officer! If your CO takes you off duty, then so be it. That is protocol. I know you want to fly but...you cannot use that as an excuse to manipulate others just to be returned to duty. You hurt me with your actions...you deceived me. How would you feel if I had done the same to you? What if I had used you and your feelings to accomplish something as trivial as returning to duty two days earlier?"

"I thought that was exactly what you were doing," Miraj sighed. "I thought you were using my need to fly to get into my pants. You wanted a trivial fling, and you were going to hurt me until you got it."

Lirha wanted to cry. She'd thought Derani thought as much of her, but to hear it spoken twisted the knife in her already-destroyed abdomen. "...Why did you think I would do that to you...?" she asked, trying to hide behind her anger. Was that how she really saw Lirha? Not as a Starfleet CO bound to duty and the oaths she'd taken, but a manipulator of those around her for her own sexual needs?

Miraj gave a non-commital shrug. "Everyone else I've run into lately seems to want to. Those men on Celes IV," she said, referring to the smugglers that she and Luke had run into nearly three months ago. "Then Ko'ra'H wanted his go, and then the old pirate on Kreanus who knew my mother before I was born. He had to be pried off me." She shuddered. "That's the sort of people I seem to attract, so why not you?"

Saalm slowly stood up, feeling the relief in the pressure on her knees. She turned away from Miraj and didn't reply to her last words; instead, Lirha pondered the question about Ko'raH that Derani had asked her. "To answer your question..," she started, "Ko'raH ambushed my starship and crew then destroyed it and killed over ten of the Starfleet souls I was responsible for. Twelve if you include my two unborn children." She paused and looked down at the carpet before speaking in a softer voice. "Then he harassed my crew -- the people I'm responsible for -- and violated you on Kreanus. And there was nothing I could do to stop him while I lay on a recovery bed unable to walk for a week." She looked back at Miraj with wet eyes. "He has hurt me beyond imagination...but somehow you have managed to hurt me just as much."

Miraj looked up at her, surprised. How could anything she'd done possibly measure up to all of that. "Huh?" She was totally baffled.

"I care about you, Miraj," said Saalm through her blurred eyes. "More than you can know..." she whispered before sniffing to compose herself. "You are young, kind, enthusiastic, and full of energy. You're a great pilot and a strong officer. All for being only 21 years old." She tried to give Derani a weak smile. "When I was your age, I didn't have the privilege of serving aboard a starship. I was still in the Academy attending Advanced Operations school. I was denoted as an 'Orion officer candidate in need of more 'indoctrination'. Nothing has ever been easy for me in Starfleet...even making friends with you." She shook her head, "You're the most beautiful woman in the quadrant so of course I would end up arguing with you..." she said to the ceiling.

Now Miraj was even more confused. She couldn't imagine Lirha struggling with anything. She had effortless poise, and the sureness of someone who had achieved high rank. And being held back a year at the academy didn't seemed to have slowed her down any in the end.

And as for the other thing. "I can't be." It was unthinkable. She had never garnered a great deal of attention. Except from the last sort of men she wanted it from, who knew why. She knew she was funny looking with being neither one thing or the other, and hair that made her look like a walking lump of candy floss. "There's you for a start. And practically every other woman on this ship. Look at Amarani, or Lieutenant Fraser, or Allyndra or the vulcan science officer." Miraj knew she wasn't hideous. She just wasn't anything special, but those women were real beauties. Lirha most of all.

Lirha stayed silent and didn't speak. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder and not to be judged by some arbitrary metric. It'd taken many years for Lirha to recognize that, and she didn't fault Miraj for her comment. But she'd already professed her desire for the woman. Several times, in fact, including in her quarters. She didn't know how much more she needed to say or how to further convince the ensign of her true feelings. "I want to be with you, Miraj," she said with finality. "I don't want you to think of me as you do right now. It...is a terrible feeling."

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

GEN Lirha Saalm
Commanding Officer
IKS DuJa'Q

Ensign Miraj Derani
Chief Flight Control Officer
IKS DuJa'Q

Ensign Mimi
Operations Officer
IKS DuJa'Q

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