The truth comes out

Posted on 07 Jan 2013 @ 1:21pm by Chief Warrant Officer 4 Cyrus Kiwosk

3,135 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Episode 02 - Resupply
Location: USS Galileo - Kiwosk's Quarters
Timeline: MD 14 2030

[ON]

"Deck five," Maenad barked. She had just rampaged down the corridor in a blur of fury from poor Kiri's quarters. The idea that Kiwosk had been up to his old tricks of telling lies about her, saying that she had punched him and shamed him in front of an entire class for her own sick pleasures had sent her off the deep end. The turbolift couldn't move fast enough for her rage, making the relatively short ride down from deck three to five seem eternal, but when the doors finally opened, she hurried out. She asked the computer which quarters were Kiwosk's, and she headed in that direction. It didn't cross her mind that he had a roommate, and even if it had it wouldn't have made any difference.

There, she was now standing outside his door. A collection of fire and brimstone, she pressed her thumb against the panel. Adrenaline building, her hands feeling lighter and lighter by the second, she waited for the human scum to show himself.

After he had finished working for Kiri he felt much better. Having talked out a lot of his issues with the Trill had definitely helped him calm his nerves. He still felt guilty about the whole ideal when he was talking about Maenad, but he knew that he had explained his respect for his former professor. It was good to have someone to talk to about just the little things.

That was why when the door chimes, he was slightly confused. He wasn't expecting anyone to come see him for the rest of the day, and considering he wasn't on duty anymore, even less so. He walked over to the door and pressed the small button on the right hand side with his sore hand, wincing slightly at the jolt of pain. As the door opened he came face to face with a very scarlet visage of Lieutenant/Professor Maenad Panne sporting the look of rage and hatred that he was all too familiar with. "Lieutenant-Profes---"

All of the tension that had been accumulating in Maenad's body for the past several weeks was suddenly let out in the form of a backhanded slap to the side of Kiwosk's face. It was both simultaneously delightful and horrifying that she did it, seeing his head jerk to the movement of her hand. She felt something hard on her knuckles as a jolt of sharp pain shot up her arm, dissipating somewhere past her elbow. A cheekbone? Maybe a tooth? "Don't you lieutenant-professor me," she said through gritted teeth. She saw the split in his lip. "You think I shamed you? How's that hole in your lip for shame?" she asked him. He looked as though he were about to say something else and she went to smack him again but was stopped by one his crushing hands.

The first swipe caught him off guard, but he was ready for the second one with a steely bone crushing grip on her wrist. Eyes full of fire and confusion he stared into her angry eyes. He could feel a slight trickle of blood running from his lip that he wiped with the back of his free hand. He kept his eyes on the Lieutenant, completely unwavering for several moments. "The hell are you talking about?" He demanded. "Shamed me? Panne...you chastised the hell out of me so many times I don't even remember, but shamed me?" He shook his head. Before realizing he was still holding her wrist. "I think you need to come inside ma'am . The doorway of an enlisted officer's quarters is probably not the best place to try to beat the crap out of an inferior." He glanced to her hand.

"The the hole in the lip is okay, I've had worse, you know...grenades and such. your love tap was more of a surprise.

"If I let this go, can I trust you not to try that again?" He asked innocently.

Maenad was trembling now. She could not believe that she had smacked him as hard as she had. Her wrist hurt now, it was so thin that he could easily break it, and she was frightened that he would. "Yes," she whispered, nearly crying.

She sucked up all of her pride and moved past his hulk of a body, entering his quarters. "Mister Kiwosk, it has been brought to my attention," she pressed on, swallowing her embarrassment of hitting him and ignoring her fear of his lethal reprisal, "That you decided to spread lies about me to my department." She held up one of her fingers to his face. "You said that when you were in my class that I regularly chastised and abused you in front of the class, that I shamed you for not doing your homework, that I physically abused you by punching you in the stomach?" she was beginning to shout now.

"Not only that, but you said that I have no tolerance for others, that I do not take questions very well, that I have a short temper? That it's all about me?" She stared at him, her eyes darting between his. "How dare you!" The hurt in her voice was very much there while her voice shook with pain and fury. "You think that I cared whether or not you did your homework? It was your life, not mine. What you decided to do with it was not my business, nor did I ever make it my business. What you did today was abhorrent, dishonest, and hurtful. I may not like you, Mister Kiwosk, but I don't go around making things up about you, and I most certainly would never approach your co-workers and slander you like you've done to me." She wiped at her eyes with the palms of her hands and sniffed. "What you did was wrong, and you have forever crossed a line with me that I fear we'll never recover."

Cyrus couldn't even begin to explain himself. Where was all this coming from. "Lady...Miss Panne. You must be talking about the conversation I had with Kiri this morning while she asked me to do some of the busy work around her work space." He took a deep breathe. "If you'll permit...Maenad....I never once said that you shamed me in public in front of the class. I was telling stories about me in your class....you remember when I asked that really stupid question in class -" He stopped to notice that she was wearing a polkadot skirt. I could have sworn she wore that during lectures...

"And you asked me to stand up and repeat the question...I felt like a moron because I didn't do my homework...not because of anything you did in the class room. If anything, it was me who caused you any amount of grief. " He gestured to a chair in the main living quarters. He replicated two glasses of water and set one near a chair he was going to sit in, and passed the other to Panne. "I never once said that you shamed me, if anything, that was the reason I passed your course. I started doing my homework after that." He sat down and took a sip of water before leaning forward, elbows against his quads and his hands clasped under his chin.

"As for the punching me in the stomach...If I remember correctly...you did punch me in the gut during our training exercise a couple days ago or did I magically fall over from gnomes?" He responded sarcastically. "You never hit me when I was at the Academy, you never laid a hand on me of any sort. If Kiri got that idea, than it was my fault for not being extra clear with her, I should have realized not to assume she knew what I was referring to." He sighed audibly.

"Don't call me by my first name," she muttered, looking at the floor from her chair.

"The truth of it is...and I didn't want to tell you this, but I respect you highly, in fact you were like the mother I needed when my older brother..." It still choked him up to this day that Osric was killed.

"My older brother was killed on an away mission." leaned back to grab his water. "I was acting out towards you, when I should have been looking for proper help dealing with my grief and you ended up being the one person I knew that could help me out. You...were there and helped me out and I took advantage of you in university."

He looked at the ground. "I'm sorry. I was a jackass back then, and I still have my moments, but..." His eyes narrowed to thin slits. "I would never insult you, or attempt to ruin your position of this ship. I respect you too much to do that. I pick on you because you always found a way to dish out just as much as I gave, just in different ways."

Maenad snorted at all of that. She wasn't sure whether he was being truthful or not, but she was inclined to believe that it was all just another wash of his smooth-talking trash. It sounded to her like he was trying to spin the guilt onto her, making himself the victim. She was smarter than that. She showed no smile nor any signal that she was happy to hear anything that came out of his mouth. She sniffed, her eyes still locked at a single spot on the carpet. Whatever he said now, or however he justified his behaviour back then made no difference to what he had done today. Should he have been more careful? He shouldn't have said it all.

She stood from her seat, deciding that she had heard enough. "You need to watch your mouth," she snapped at him, but she didn't shout as she had before. "You need to get it through your head that whatever you say to inflate yourself at the expense of others is hurtful. Gossip is like a comfortable feather-filled pillow being torn open in the wind. You might be able to get some of the feathers back, but the pillow will never be as comfortable as it was before. Ever." She turned toward the door, but stopped. "And, do you have any idea how distraught Kiri is over all of this? She's fragile enough without your flippant remarks. If you have any respect for her, or care for her at all, you'll keep your distance."

"Gossip....GOSSIP?!" He didn't move out of the chair but raised his voice heatedly. "You come here...backhand me in the mouth and tell me that I'm a gossip?! Lieutenant, you have a lot of nerve pulling that shit, because that's exactly what this is. If telling a story I found funny from my days in the academy to someone is considered gossip, I must have missed that class, because I was telling a story." He eyed the woman in front of him unflinchingly. "I did not tell my story to 'inflate' myself, as you can see, if I inflate anymore I'd pop." He added with a bitter chuckle. " How was I supposed to know that she was going to be upset over that. I've spoken with the woman three times! I was trying to get her to laugh. "

He took a steadying breathe and stared back. "Those stories... my stories, they are about the things I have done in my life, but they certainly don't look negatively upon anyone. They are meant to be silly, funny, things I've done in my past. You don't tell stories about your past? It just so happens I ended up telling the wrong story to the wrong person unintentionally.

" When I realized that I had upset her, I instantly apologized and stated that in fact, that the fault could be lain at my feet from my past. She asked if I enjoyed doing those things, I told her that at the time I did, but for reasons that were completely different from what I thought. Did you ever ask Kiri what I said about you?" He laughed. "No, you didn't, I know you didn't, because you're here in my quarters still debating whether or not you should come over here again and slap me. "

He sighed. "How's your wrist? I didn't mean to grab it as hard as I did." He stated in a low voice, he had never wanted to hurt her. Training and instinct had kicked in.

"As for my ' flippant remarks': do you know that most of everyone she ends up talking to either leaves or has been killed?! Now you're telling her that yet another person she can't talk to is the one she offered to help. " Cyrus shook his head. "I can understand why you're protective of her Maenad, but I'd never do anything to intentionally hurt anyone. Certainly not a socially awkward young woman who has trouble making friends."

He took another sip of water and let out another breathe. "What I said earlier is true, I'm not bullshitting you like I did in your office those years ago. Whether you want it, I personally don't give a flying donkey's behind." He was trying very hard not to swear. "But I will not just stand here and have you tell me who I can and can not talk to. That woman needs friends, and while I'm brash, sometimes insensitive and a part time butt head, I also know that she just needs time to be coaxed out of her shell and her walls." Kiwosk readjusted himself in his chair, both legs crossed at the ankles, only to stand up and roll his right shoulder. "Out of all the professors, do you know why I remembered you after all this time?"

He turned around. "Do you think it was the amounts of pranks I pulled...no. Though I have to say, you drove me insane with all those calls to your office. " He sighed. "Can I ask you a question Maenad?"

"No," she said to him. "You cannot." Her head was spinning with confusion. He had said so much and yet so little. He might have said nothing at all. He laced his words with candid remarks, jokes, and self-absorbed laughter. Nothing had changed. Nothing. He was still the same immature fool that he had been when she'd taught him. He just didn't listen to anything; he was still calling her Maenad, twice by her count since she had said not to. He might have been somewhat right about her telling him who he could talk to, but he was wrong about his justification for telling lies about her and sullying her name so he could get a cheap laugh. Who else had he talked to that hadn't told her what he'd said, like Kiri had? He was close to Pola, maybe that was why she was so curt with her in sickbay.

She was still staring at him, an air of elitist condescension came over her. She was no longer shouting, nor shrieking, nor losing herself in shakiness. She was now entirely confident of her position because she was right and he was wrong, which he had just made clairvoyantly clear. "I do not care what your stories are," she said. "I only care that if they are to be about me that they are true. Do not insult me to make them entertaining, because that is the definition of gossip. A story told about someone else that is not true is gossip, and it is hurtful. I am careful to whom I tell my stories; I use discretion, and I tell the truth. I have never told anyone aboard this ship about the stunts you have pulled on me, nor will I ever. I have not because, whether I like you or not, I must show you a certain respect. Unlike you, I understand that whatever feelings I have toward you may not be held by others, and it is not my business to influence others toward or against you. I would never go to Lieutenant Stone or to Mister Rhodes, or Davis, or any of your fellow security officers and tell them what a terrible person you were to me, or indeed that you still are, even if I thought it would make a funny story.

"We serve on a starship now. How you wound up here, I will never know. If Lieutenant Stone goes against his better judgement and reinstates you, perhaps then you will finally realise that your schoolyard childhood is long over. If I cannot convince you of it, then perhaps his heavy disciplinary hand can, and I hope for your sake that it does. I am the chief of science on the fleet's leading science vessel: a member of the senior staff and part of this ships chain of command. Which means nothing to you, as you have made abundantly clear, but it means something to me. I cannot and will not have you fraternising with my department whilst including me in your slanderous stories of total fiction. Do you understand me? I am not a character in your life to be molded according to whatever shoddy narrative you've built for yourself, but an actual living, breathing human being with my own thoughts, feelings, and emotions." She looked disappointed and disgusted by him.

She looked down at the wrist she was cradling in her hand, seeing that it was badly bruised. "Do not call me by my first name again." She briefly held his eyes before abruptly turning, her skirt flaring with her, and she stepped out through his doors.

Cyrus almost grabbed her shoulder and threw her back into his room, but he had broken enough Frat regulations for one day. He was fairly comfortable this would go any farther, but his mind was racing.

Panne, what was she looking for. the second he opened his mouth, she had shut down. Right when he thought he might have gotten whatever step forward in their professional relationship. This week had certainly been an interesting one.

He wasn't going to lay down yet; however. He would figure out what happened and get to the bottom of this before he was permanently removed from the ship.


[OFF]

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo


CWO Cyrus Kiwosk
Formerly Securty/Tactical
USS Galileo

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