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 (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻

SNIP

“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…

When he breathed out, so did she, only she started laughing softly even as her face turned bright red and flushed from slight embarrassment. Johann had jumped a thought train off of the personal and back to the professional and she had not jumped with him, causing significant confusion. And even though it had hurt, the wild torrent of emotions she felt due to his ambiguous wording, she could not help but laugh at the absurdity of trying to manage this friendship and professional relationship in light of her alternative life. She looked up toward the ceiling and shook her head as her hands moved to her hips. God, her husband would have found this particular moment to be hilarious.

He was momentarily confused by this reaction, until he thought about it more…

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

She laughed again and turned to him, letting his continued addendums to play out. Grinning she lifted a hand to scratch at the back of her neck. “I think in any universe, you will always be the most intriguing, frustrating and incredible man I have ever met.”

Johann felt a bit embarrassed by that. He didn’t think of himself as being the most of any of those things. Even if he was able to concede he could be any of them, even all of them at once right now for her.

She returned to sit beside him, loose in body now. “Yes. We should plan some morale boosting activities. It will be nice to see people being more social.”

Nox

“With clothes on,” he appended at the end of her sentiment, just to be even more clear. Though she had been wearing clothes that day, they were just different… and he wasn’t about to get in trouble again dwelling on how.

Her eyebrow raised and she tried not to laugh. He was embarrassed and in no small amount of discomfort over the Freudian slip. Sienna certainly didn’t want to make him feel worse or make him clam up. If they could end this crazy discussion on a mutually nice note, she thought maybe they would have a chance at not being awkward or embarrassed around everyone else anytime they met up. Had she been wrong to keep this information about her husband to herself these last few years? Only time would tell.

“We could try games,” he mused. “Avik and I actually played a few card games once. We could do card games. We could do board games. We could do video games. We could do holodeck games. We could even try to do sports.” They were after all, all supposed to be doing some kind of physical training.

– Johann Dvorak, CO

“OH, a game night sounds fun. Perhaps once every two weeks, we turn the lounge into a gaming space for games that are suitable in such a space. We could perhaps have a holodeck games tournament with a multitude of game options. Perhaps a friendly tournament of laser tag for the security department, a trivia tournament for Science, and so on. I will start working on a plan for something along those lines, but the easiest path is to make sure we make the space available and the ambiance ready for something like the regular game nights.”

Nox, CNS

“I do have the ability to make space available around here, if you need me to use it.” It was an odd way of referring to his own status as the Captain of the ship, as though simply being able to order something to happen was a kind of mystic power rather than a direct consequence of his rank and assignment to this vessel.

“I don’t know anything about ambiance though. That I think I will leave in your capable hands.” Was it true? Maybe he did know something about ambiance, but he was really just trying to indicate that yes, this conversation can end on a mutually nice note and it didn’t require them to be permanently awkward forever.

– Johann Dvorak, CO