Flawed Logic

Posted on Thu Nov 26th, 2015 @ 9:12am by Captain Charybdis MacGregor

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Taking Chances
Location: USS Bonne Chance, Deck 3, Science Lab Gamma
Timeline: 2265
Tags: 1stlove

As she worked on the component for one of the sensor packages she had proposed, locked in one of the small science laboratories on Deck 2 just below the bridge, Charybdis was in considerable personal turmoil.

Her hands were not good at delicate work; that which made her an unlikely yet phenomenal gymnast had failed to increase her hand eye coordination. This left her mind able to work far faster than her fingers, which in turn left her ill-suited for fine detail work such as this. However, she was determined to show some progress for her time away from her post, and she needed for her mind to be engaged in something so that she could ignore the imperatives with which her body and soul were currently tasking her.

This plan was, at the moment, spectacularly unsuccessful, because she was crying freely while she tried to force her clumsy fingers to do the delicate work she was demanding of them. Which of course only made her coordination worse.

She did not weep out of pure frustration, though it was certainly exacerbating the situation; another poor choice in a recent string of the same. Instead she wept because she knew what was coming... her sudden infatuation with the Captain would come to no good. She was uncertain exactly how and when she had lost control of that situation, but she had most definitely done just that, and now she was failing in her duties. Even now she was avoiding the Bridge because she did not know how to face him, nor did she relish facing the Bridge crew, either. She would get past the opinions of others- she always did. But her opinion of herself was the issue.

He was just a man, like any other. She had practically made a career out of using their attraction to her to her own advantage. While she was more than capable and rather immodestly brilliant, she was exotic and quite appealing to some, and she knew it. Flaunting her charms and playing off men's inability to resist an interested woman had served her well, and she had begun doing so with the new captain as a matter of course. It was natural and instinctive to her, after all.

But this time she had reacted. This time there were feelings on her part for the man, and he was pervading her thoughts.

This was thoroughly unexpected. Disturbing. Quite frightening to her, actually.

For the first time in her adult life, she had absolutely no idea what to do. She considered asking the Doctor or Celes for counsel, but this was not their problem, it was hers. She needed to deal with it. As the duotronic screwdriver slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor, she dropped her head to the desk and gave in to the wave of emotion and simply sobbed. She was lost, adrift, with no way to steer her way free of this, and all she wanted at the moment was to press herself against the rugged human and feel his arms around her to calm her and make her feel safe.

There was a long and athletic sequence of actions that she would also care to enact following that, her body reminded her, which only frustrated her more.

Was that the solution? To simply give in to it and relieve the pressure? She did not know, but she did know that should she do so then she would have to prepare to have no friends aboard the Bonne Chance for the rest of her tour, and that anything she achieved would simply be viewed as 'sleeping her way to the top'.

The stares and whispers she had reconciled already, as Xian had pointed out in Sickbay. She had learned to ignore those long ago, and rank did have privilege. She could not be openly disrespected without a price being paid by those lower in rank, and it could be construed as harassment by those above her. It simply meant that she would have no true friends aboard the Bonne Chance more than likely, as had been the case in her Academy days. Could she accept that?

She could if she had someone sharing her bed, she mused. Someone who appreciated her as more than just an exotic alien sexual encounter. Or at least, she imagined so, for she had never known such a man... but it was beginning to become apparent to her that she was desirous of one.

Was that perhaps the truth of the matter? He was human, after all, and she was an exotic presence to him. He was reacting to her as so many had before, so should she surrender to him then might his curiosity be sated and he would return to business as usual, his interest a thing of the past? It had certainly happened to her before- once she was, as they put it, a 'notch in the bedpost', they moved on and sought new conquests. And if that were the case, would she care? She had slept with classmates at the Academy and had encounters with crewmen on the Antares then continued working with them... but never her superiors.

Could that not be the answer? And why was the idea somehow so repugnant to her? She did not understand her own mind, and that bothered her far more than anything else. Even with her propensity for changing her mind on a whim and altering her perspective to suit the situation, she at least always understood her own underlying logic. But in this case there was a deeper yearning inside of her with which she was thoroughly unfamiliar, and it frightened her.

She picked her head up and fetched the duotronic screwdriver from under the table where it had fallen, then she turned it over in her hands, staring at it. She was not vulnerable to Pon Farr, and while her reproductive system was faulty, the monthly rush of hormones never produced a reaction anything like this. Why was the man so damned fascinating? Why did she care? What would it take to regain control of herself?

She slammed the screwdriver into the table, burying it to the hilt in the plastic fabricated workbench. She needed a decision. She needed a plan of action. She needed to know what to do next so that when she faced him again she would not be a babbling idiot once more. She wiped her eyes and made herself presentable in the reflective surface of one of the consoles, grateful for the fact that she did not wear makeup, then it struck her.

She could not control him, but she did control herself. And thus, she could control how she thought of him, and how she reacted to him. All she had to do was imagine that he simply wanted her as a sexual conquest and nothing more, and she could be free... free to think, to work, to act. If he held nothing of value for her, then she wanted nothing from him and she could simply go on about her life.

It was flawed logic, as usual. But it got her on her feet, and headed back onto the Bridge.

 

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