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Victria

Conversations in Civility

Only a few seconds after Victria entered the armory, Mark stormed in, looking ready to tear the entire room apart. Sealing the door behind him, he issued about the most violent expulsion order that the lowly armory team had ever experienced. They scurried out of the side door with Mark hot on their heels, sealing and locking the door behind the last one with his personal security code. He stared at the closed doors for several seconds before turning to face Victria. She was staring at him, clearly unimpressed by his show of force.

 

"I am so God damned sick of you. The attitude. The veiled threats. The jokes, subtle and not. The disrespect. The attempted murder!" He barked the last one, a shaky finger pointing to the barely noticeable scar on his neck. "I break the bond because we're as bad together as we are apart. I give you as much damned space as I can give you with our respective roles on this ship. Nothing ever satisfies you, nothing! I've been working for over two years to manage some sort of a non-mind blowingly ridiculous relationship and nothing ever works!"

 

"What do you want Victria? You want me to just ignore you as long as we're both on this ship? You want me to swallow my pride and transfer out because my subordinate with a penchant for killing keeps kicking my ass and making me feel foolish, or do you want me to get down on my knees so you can finish the job you started in the holodeck?" His eyes burned with as much intensity as she'd ever seen. One way or another, "this" was going to end here and now.

 

Though gritting her teeth, Victria did not advance on him, keeping her rage barely restrained behind a thin veneer of civility. "What I want," she began slowly, grating out every word with effort, "is to forget everything that has happened between us. What I want is to travel back to the beginning to stop all of this before it began. I want to be able to breathe the same air as you without being able to taste your blood rolling over my tongue. I want to be able to look at you without wanting to choke the life out of you with my bare hands!" Her tone increased in volume with every word until she was yelling at him. Her hands clenched into fists, driving her fingernails into her skin until she drew blood.

 

"I want to be able to co-exist in the same space with you without feeling this stabbing pain in my chest. I want these wounds I cannot see to heal! I want to feel something other than hurt. You wounded me more deeply than any knife or blade and I cannot fix it. I want the weakness gone!"

 

His face turned from indignant, to an open jaw hang at her last words. "I wounded you? I wounded you!? Look at this!" He savagely grabbed her by the front of her uniform, pulling her inches from his neck. "This is you! In the end I was nothing more than a piece of meat. Even now I know it's taking every fiber in your body to hold your mouth and fangs shut!"

 

Rather than tempt the Fates, he pushed her back, sending her into a rack of phaser rifles, causing several to fall off. He then produced his wrist, with the same puncture scars. "Now look at this, and tell me which set of scars you think I can live with! So enlighten me, Victria, please enlighten me on how I've wounded you so horribly!?"

 

She snapped in frustration, grabbing one of the rifles jabbing into her back and hurling it across the room to shatter against the lockers. "I told you to leave! I warned you and you thought yourself invulnerable. You know that I am no human! I cannot always control my instincts and predatory urges! You knew that! You are as much to blame as I in that regard."

 

She turned to glare at him and pounded her fist on her chest. "You left me with nothing! I am half of what I once was. Everything is gone. Everything is dead. When we were together, I felt almost human. I experienced your emotions and it helped me to understand. But it is all gone now and all am I left with are the urges that I can barely control." Fists clenched again, she began pacing like a caged animal, jaw clenched with anger. "I cannot live this way. I foolishly opened myself to you and now I cannot be as I was before - strong and unfeeling, never blinded by loneliness or pain."

 

As he stared down at the now destroyed rifle, some of the anger washed away, replaced by a little sadness and mostly regret. He sighed deeply, recomposing himself. "Well, you're right about a great many things. We can't go back. This constant snapping, shoot first ask questions later mindset… I didn't have that before coming to this ship, before bonding with you. I was slow to anger, quick to forgive, a damned optimist if you can believe that. So you might have it harder than me, but don't think I walked out of your quarters that night, pushed you out of my mind and continued on without a care. You're gone, but it's a void in the back of my mind, which just makes me think of you, which just makes me think of everything that went wrong."

 

Once again the anger flared. He grabbed a rifle and shattered it on the wall, pacing for a moment before turning on her. "So yes, you told me to leave, and yes I was foolish and naive to stay, but damnit Victria, I cared about you! If you claim to have had such a human experience bonded to me then you know what that feeling is. That hope that maybe I had just enough influence to calm you down, and even if I didn't I'd rather you take that rage out on me, then having you do something stupid that may have pushed us over the edge into a war with the Scorpiad, the Al-Ucard rebels, or both!"

 

"I was in the holodeck so I would not do anything foolish." She stopped and turned to look at him, brow slightly furrowed. "I know you were only trying to help, but I did not need it then. I needed to work through the rage. It was the only way I knew how to rid myself of it. Think back to all of the times that you have tried to stifle my nature. Every time you berated me for following my instincts because they were not human and you thought them base and animalistic. For every situation that you have tried to control, there are dozens more that I have managed to handle myself, to control myself. You know that I did not hurt you intentionally. I was not... capable of cohesive thought. All I could smell was blood. I am starving. Every day I ingest synthetic compounds, but they only mimic the real thing and cease to be effective. I am starving, slowly, but all the same. That coupled with the rage... I could not stop myself."

 

Sighing, he crouched down, his head in his hands, staring at the floor. "I don't want to hate you anymore. I don't want to live with this tension, this void. Every time I think I can look at you without a maelstrom of emotions, I go back to the image of your teeth sinking into my neck, and I don't know how to move past and accept what happened. I don't know if I can."

 

She dropped to her knees beside him and put her hand on his cheek, lifting his face so that he would be forced to look at her. "I did not mean to put you in harm's way. And I do not intend to continue forcing you to relive it. I... I do not always know how to handle these feelings except in anger."

 

He gave her a small nod, closing his eyes. How he'd missed her touch. It was hard to stay objective, to even stay mad like this. Could he move on though? If he didn't try, and stayed on this ship he knew it would consume him. He couldn't leave the ship, not after finally feeling like the first time in a long time he was somewhere he belonged. "I'll make you a deal..." He trailed off, as if still trying to think the words. "I'll walk away when you make it clear it's in everyone's best interest, and you don't bite me anymore. Deal?" He couldn't hold back the smallest lip curling smile at making such a statement.

 

"I will never feed from you again unless you offer it," she promised softly. Her hand caught his wrist and she lifted it to her mouth. Their eyes locked, she kissed the marks there that she'd left. Then, slowly so as not to startle him, she leaned forward and kissed the scar he bore on his neck. The smell of him was intoxicating. Eyes closed, she inhaled deeply as she drew back.

 

Impulsively, he quickly pulled her into a kiss, gently at first but quickly building passion. Objectivity, rationality and sanity be damned. They broke, resting on each other's foreheads, catching their breath. "Together in the hunt." He stated once he could complete coherent words, presenting the same wrist to her downward eyes. It was as good of an offer as he could present.

 

Her breath caught in her throat and she quickly covered his wrist with her hand, shaking her head. "No, I will take no offerings of pity. You know the risks and the consequences and I will not subject you to them again, no matter how much I might want it." Pulling back a few centimeters, her eyes searched his. "Give me this instead." She kissed him again, heatedly and frantically, all of her anger and despair and loneliness channeling to passion that would not be denied.

 

Even without the bond he could feel her, and he wasn't about to deny her. Weeks of built up emotion expelled as they battled for dominance in the embrace. Mark eventually prevailed, pushing her onto her back, her head narrowly missing one of the numerous strewn riffles. Needing release as badly as she, he was on top of Victria in seconds, continuing where they'd left off.

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