Dawning Moment

Posted on Sat Jul 28th, 2012 @ 2:37pm by Petty Officer 3rd Class Sehra Vahn & Lieutenant Commander Dylan Blake
Edited on on Mon Aug 20th, 2012 @ 7:54pm

2,629 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Sowing the Seeds
Location: Starbase 116
Timeline: Current

Dylan Blake kept his gaze fixed downward, directed at the padd gripped with white knuckles with such fierceness it was amazing he'd not bore holes clean through it. After his incident this morning he couldn't look a single person in the eye, news travelled fast and gossip moved faster than the speed of light. At least, that's how it felt when you were at the butt of the joke.

He could hear whispers close-by but wouldn't give them the satisfaction of looking upward as he waited for Sehra. Who, unlike him had been behaving herself and still working! He wished bitterly they were able to meet somewhere more private, some place where he didn't feel like a goggled sculpture or sniggers.

Than, thankfully, in a normal flurry of haste a body slid into the chair opposite. Only then did Dylan look up, "Thank goodness it's you," he said. "Feels like I've been sitting here for a year."

"I bet." Being the centre of attention never bothered Sehra though abject humiliation was not something she would likely have found any easier to deal with. Whilst she could sense the lack of sympathy from some, those who believe Dylan had deserved his embarrassing interlude, the Betazoid hadn't really paid as much attention to the gossiping masses as Dylan and had instead been intent in just getting here as fast as her overly-motivated self could manage. Concern filled her expression, from her blue eyes to the gentle creases in her forehead and, for once, she didn't try to make light of the situation by teasing him. "I'm sorry, I came as soon as I could."

He smiled weakly: "Can we continue this some where else, somewhere... with less people?" He avoided the word 'private' carefully not wishing to upset Sehra further.

"Sure, if that will make you feel more comfortable."

Young though she was, the psychologist in Sehra wrestled with another side of her that the young brunette wasn't as successful in identifying. When she'd heard what had happened she'd felt a mixture of deep concern and shock but there had also been anger, her least favourite emotion. Anger that anyone would behave like this and, though she didn't like to admit it, anger at Dylan for leaving himself so open to it. More than anything, she felt suffocating guilt. She had decided to finish up an assignment before making the most of shoreleave, believing that her recent personal leave to attend her sister's wedding had given her less cause to recreate than the rest of the crew. Being entirely unused to having anyone but herself to consider, she hadn't given much thought as to whether Dylan might actually need her. Did he need her? She might have kept him out of this mess but did that mean he didn't prefer to use his shoreleave seeking out the company of others? For once, Sehra wasn't sure of herself and plagued by indecisive guilt, found herself less useful to him than she normally tried to be.

Her stonily silence felt deafening as they made their exit. Perhaps she's judging me, Dylan thought, and perhaps he deserved her judgement having proved that he couldn't change his stripes. He sought to take her hand, squeezed it gently and lightly pulled her nearer as he lead them into an alcove, framed by starlight.

"I'm sorry," he said before her questioning eye spoke volumes. "I made a fool of myself, and I don't blame you if you're angry at me, I deserve it."

"Dylan..."

Perhaps the biggest issue was Sehra's inability to really understand her own reaction. She hadn't had a lot of time to analyse it and had only got as far as being reasonably sure it wasn't some new form of out-of-character jealousy. Betazoid culture tended to be more fluid than traditional Terran standards were comfortable with and though she felt guilty that the reason he might have sought out another's company was because she hadn't made herself available to him, she wasn't specifically hurt that he didn't view them as mutually exclusive. Neither of them had made promises to that effect and the benefit of being a telepath was that she knew he enjoyed his time with her no matter who else he chose to associate with. No, it wasn't jealousy.

Then what was it?

Sighing, she turned to face him properly and slipped her other hand into his, head slightly bowed to avoid eye contact at first as she tried to vocalise her feelings. "I'm not angry with you. I was, at first," she admitted, lifting her eyes to meet his finally, "but only because you scared me. I can't lecture you on being impulsive without sounding wildly hypocritical but there are a lot of reasons people go to these lengths to capture people and quite a few of them don't end very nicely." Her brow furrowed gently. "I feel....responsible. Maybe if I'd been there instead of working you'd have known which ones you could trust."

His expression softened at her confession, driving home how much she really did care for him. Now he felt guilty having just thrown some of that trust and affection back at her. Dylan raised his arms and took her by the shoulders, "No," he said. "Don't you feel guilty, this was my mistake, my foolish mistake. And I'm so sorry I made you cross, it was never my intention. I never planned for things to go the way they did, I feel so stupid right now."

That didn't cover it, worse still, beyond the embarrassment of being discovered stark naked by the Captain was the crushing sensation he was experience right now. His heart ached as it hammered against this ribs for fear of leaving the one women who'd understood him on so many levels, the woman who lit up every room the instant she arrived. Though romance had always been a game to him, Sehra had changed the rules, she'd changed every aspect of his normally shallow and physical strategy.

Cupid, as absurd as it was, was poised to strike.

And now Blake feared everything was about to be undone.

"Sehra..." he gently cupped her chin and lifted slightly to look her in the eye. She was hard to read, her expression mixed while he felt as if he was dying inside. "I'm sorry,"

"I know you are."

The soft response sounded tired yet not exactly laden with the anger Sehra had claimed she'd felt. Eye contact wasn't usually an issue for her and she met his gaze now with relative ease but her expression remained uncertain, a clear reflection of the bizarre assortment of emotions she couldn't quite get a solid grasp on. Scanning his face for a moment, the Betazoid's features softened into a gentle smile. "I know you are," she repeated, resting a hand on his lower back. "But it's not me that you need to apologise to."

And it wasn't. He'd scared her and the fear alone had been unexpected but he hadn't hurt her in any way that she could perceive as a bad omen. Caring for people had always been something her enormous heart could handle quite easily but bonding with them was another matter entirely, especially in recent years now that her life hadn't quite turned into the marital bliss she'd expected. Without thinking too deeply about it, she'd become wary and wasn't entirely sure why. Being left by the man she'd expected to marry one day had hurt but she knew better, had been raised to know better. She was an optimist, wasn't she?

Not when it came to affairs of the heart, it seemed. The realisation that she'd subconsciously seen things with Dylan in a much different light to what she'd really thought she expected of their companionship would take a while to process but it wasn't something he could have been expected to take into consideration. They'd never discussed commitment, never broached the idea of being mutually exclusive. Judging by his mood and the look in his eye, however, the young engineer expected plates full of food to be flung at his head as a result of his philandering. It almost made her chuckle.

"I don't care in the way you think I do," she said quietly, wrapping her other arm around him. "I like a pretty girl as much as the next person." Her quip brought familiar light to her eyes but she didn't linger, having no intention of making light of the moment even though she found it endearing that he had yet to figure out she was about as liberally-minded as he was. "I don't want you to stop being yourself if that's what makes you happy. I just don't want you to lose yourself in the process."

She sighed. "Listen, if you're feeling pressured or you think that things between us are getting too serious, I can understand that. Stuck on the ship, you don't exactly have a lot of options." Surprised by how difficult the words were to say, Sehra swallowed and pushed on. "If you need to back off, I get it. You don't have to go to drastic lengths and wind up in seedy places if you just want a bit of freedom."

Despite her phrasing and light quip Blake didn't feel lifted, in fact he felt down right miserable and speechless. Not from surprise or rage but from his own uselessness and inability to remain honest and to speak his feelings. He licked his parched lips: "But that's not what I want," he squeezed out in a hurry. "I don't want to be that person, that guy that puts his arms around anything that moves. Its just taken this long to realise it last night especially." He paused wrestling with his tormented mind and sand paper mouth. "Being with you has changed everything, you've grounded me, and...everytime we part I yearn for you again." He looked away unable to thread together what he really wanted to say.

"I like you Sehra," he began again after a beat. "I really do, and I don't want us to break up, I, I." He clamped his mouth shut, tapped his foot in annoyance - what can't he just say it?

Because it frightened him. Once bitten twice shy.

He took a deep breath, "I want to know you better." he cringed at his poor statement and tried again daring not to pause once his mouth had opened. "Iwantyou." It blurted out faster then he'd expected. Sheepishly he gave her a embarrassed smile.

The blue eyes that gazed up at him did so not with disbelief or even shock but with careful, deliberate intent to comprehend. Dylan didn't always plunge into in depth explanation about his feelings, Sehra had grown used to interpreting him through his actions and surface emotions and had become reasonably adept at pinning down the kind of person he was. She'd known for a while now that he wasn't as shallow as he thought he was and recognised the indecisive distrust that seemed so eloquently to mirror her own. She had wound up refusing to define what they had because she knew it hinged too much on the preparedness of two hurt people and even she hadn't been able to tell just how close to wanting to change Dylan was.

Her brow furrowed slightly.

It wasn't a frown so much as thoughtful consideration. Thoughts that she'd always forced herself to avoid exploring ran rampant through her mind and seemed to lift a dreadful weight as they passed. Much of her decision to work, she realised, had come from her uncertainty of how to approach this shoreleave. Out in the vastness of space, their inability to escape and their relative lack of alternatives had cocooned them both from having to really broach the issue of defining what they had but Sehra understood now that she'd approached this particular leave with a certain degree of nervousness. She hadn't wanted to assume to take up his time when the engineer might have been relishing the opportunity for a change in scenery and she hadn't wanted to complicate things for when they eventually did head back into space by questioning him directly. It had been an assumption, not something she normally fell prey to, and given the ramifications of her choice to send him off on his own, it was probably understandable that the young Betazoid looked pained for a moment before she realised that the expression was probably entirely misleading.

So she smiled.

"You should never have had to worry that I was going anywhere," she said quietly, giving him a squeeze, "and for that I'm truly sorry. I just didn't want to assume or seem possessive. I'd rather you do what's right for you, after all." Leaning upwards, she kissed him softly. "It's hard for me too so I know. I get it. But Dylan, I was never with you just because we were stuck on the ship and I'm not disappearing suddenly just because you made a mistake."

He lowered his arms and pull her against his chest, "I'm glad," he smiled releived she hadn't retreated at his sudden emotional release. He traced her ear through the curtain of soft hair thoughtfully and pressed his lips to her crown, "I never realized it was this hard for you, if I'd known I don't think we would have made it this far and the last thing you need from me is pressure."

"Being with you isn't hard," Sehra corrected him, sensing the misunderstanding. "I never found that difficult at all, which maybe should have told me something. But knowing what I wanted, what I was ready for and then being able to get out of my own headspace long enough to sense if you wanted it too...." The Betazoid chuckled and lifted her head. "I may be a telepath but I'm not always much of a mind-reader. I guess it got too easy to just not think about it and to hope like crazy that thing just wouldn't change."

"I can assure you its worse being human," Dylan smirked. "At least you get an inkling the winds changing before the storm hits, all I have is an umbrella, with holes in it for damage control." He gazed down at her slightly wondering how this bubbly woman curbed his roaming habits. "So, where do that leave us now? I understand if you want to stay as we are if you're not ready or don't want anything more..." it pained him to say it but he didn't want to show her disrespect or appear any more shallow than before.

"You know what I think?" Finally relaxed, Sehra offered the engineer a warm, affectionate smile. "I think it leaves us much where we were. Not," she hastened to add before the wave of disappointment she sensed from him could take hold, "that I mean we're just friends with benefits." She reached a hand up to run her index finger down the length of his nose and then laughed softly as she gave him a pecking kiss. "I just think we've been more than that for a while and not realised it. I haven't been tempted by anyone else, Dylan," she added more seriously. "I can't see that changing."

Relieved, Blake breathed deeply and felt his lips turning upward into a warm, genuine smile. "I feel deeply privileged," he said lowly a fraction before he bought his lips to her. "I promise I won't let you down."

"I know," came the soft, somewhat muffled reply. Grinning against his lips, Dylan's newly-appointed girlfriend gave him a squeeze. "Not if I have anything to do with it, anyway."

 

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