Posted by Lieutenant Siennadye Nox (Counselor) in Arboretum - Sienna Comes Clean

Posted by Captain Johann Dvorak (CO) in Arboretum - Sienna Comes Clean

Posted by Lieutenant Siennadye Nox (Counselor) in Arboretum - Sienna Comes Clean
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻

SNIP

“I can imagine,” he said simply. “That’s actually really awful. Our universe sucks for you.”

Sienna laughed a bit and nodded with a look of chagrin on her face. “Yeah, a little bit.”

He had actually remembered more of that event, including Vora’s lovely hula dance number that succeeded at capturing his attention. He didn’t think he had descended into outright ogling, but they weren’t hiding the existence of their relationship at that point, and she had that nice strapless violet thing with the flowers going on that really worked rather well for her. It looked great on the floor later that evening too.

You had a floral thing too, he thought, not realizing that he was thinking “loudly,” and that his mind had wandered slightly away from the topic of how painful Sienna must have felt that evening, to what she had been wearing.

– Johann Dvorak, CO

“Midnight blue swimsuit cover dress with a hibiscus flower painted on it. I also had a massive floral clip in my hair. It weighed a ton but I thought it was so cute.” She grinned and ran her fingers through her hair absentmindedly. “That was also the day I met Vora. At first, she thought I was her Sienna. Apparently the two had been good friends. I was sorry to disabuse her of the notion. I flubbed the introduction a bit but she was kind nonetheless. She danced the Hula with me.”

Nox, CNS

“Yeah, I was just remembering that…” he said somewhat cautiously. He didn’t want to actually explain the intermediate step between the thought she picked up on and the more general recollections of that evening. It was pretty hot, he thought, before immediately wanting to have not thought it.

“Umm… but anyway, we should like… you know… have a thing.” Knocked off balance enough to not use proper nouns… would Sienna exploit that?

– Johann Dvorak, CO

The combination of his general flustered demeanor and mention of her clothes collided awkwardly in her mind with his spoken words. Her mind ground to a halt and then sped up to insane levels of imagination. Both good and bad ideas fluttered through, images of intimacies she had not allowed herself to entertain caused her to cough and stand abruptly. Sienna took several steps away, distancing herself from a man who could have been her husband in so many alternate universes but was not here. She needed the distance desperately.

His eyebrows shot right up. He definitely stepped into it bad. He knew something bad could happen at this meeting before he walked into it. This looked bad, and worse than he expected.

She was so tense, it hurt physically. One hand lay fisted at her heart as she faced away from him, the other wrapped around her middle. Quickly shuttting down her imaginings with a ferocity that left a gaping hole of lost hope within her heart, she took several deep breaths.

After two seconds of this, Johann started to get confused. Betazoid women probably deal with stray thoughts like that all the time, right? Like it would be unusually uncomfortable in this particular case, but…

“Reality. Reality. Reality.” She whispered in a mantra. He couldn’t have meant what it sounded like. Out loud, she commented, “I think you should clarify what you mean by a ‘having a thing’.”

Nox, CNS

Johann blinked once, slowly. He fully understood the problem immediately. There were many possibilities contained within that particular ambiguous noun, and none of them were on his mind when that word came out of his mouth. None? Well… the two of them were

Johann took a deep breath, and then released it. He repeated that pattern while carefully constructing the sentence that he would speak below. Pausing to breathe in, talking to breathe out.

“I was referring to… the suggestion you made earlier… that we would benefit from… investment in… fun activities… and… morale boosters.”

He breathed out fully, seeming strained by this activity. He had used the exact words she had used earlier. The context to those were clear at the time. Was it ambiguous now? “We” was always an ambiguous word. But back then they were both talking about “the crew” as “we,” even though there were plenty of other “we”that were being talked about in this conversation. Indeed, the problem was that he accidentally introduced ambiguity about who “we” might be. And what about…

Oh Lord, he thought, mortified at how ridiculous those could possibly sound in the context of any possible thing Johann might have thought, of any possible thing she might have thought that he might be thinking.

“Of the type you were suggesting,” he appended shortly afterwards. “At the time you made the suggestion. In the context of the crew.”

– Johann Dvorak, CO