A Chance to Continue
Andy came up with the title and kept me on track, even though I had a bazillion things I wanted to say. LOL! Thanks, Andy—Maer
Saturday, 04 Aug 2525
Brisbane, Meridian
Blue Sun (Qing Long) system
Vikki had seen everyone in turn, starting with Tian and ending with the Captain. Well, ending in front of his cabin door, at least. Several times over the past few days, she'd gone up to knock and lacked the courage to do it. Remorse and apprehension twisted her insides into knots. Her relationship with him had been strained of late. She'd said some rather mean things to him, despite her best efforts to keep things on a professional footing, and now she wasn't certain how any overture on her part would be received. Would Valentine think she was insincere? Or would he pay her back in kind? She didn't think she could bear it if she'd hurt him. She wasn't sure if she could withstand a withering reception. Even if it was only what she deserved, Vikki didn't want to find out that she'd lost his respect or his friendship.
So she put it off in favor of seeing the others first. Now she had only Valentine left. The door was all that stood between them.
Taking a deep breath, Vikki sent up a silent prayer and rapped on his cabin door.
Val wasn't sleeping well lately, something he wasn't accustomed to. He normally took everything in stride, processed it all in his head, letting everything go before his head hit the pillow. But Reavers weren't something you just let go. And so he had been getting less sleep and finding his edge to be thinner than normal. Which perhaps explained, why, when Vikki knocked, Val almost jumped five feet in the air from where he was sitting at his desk. He was just thankful he hadn't screamed or cried out. He took a minute to take a deep breath before calling out (in a mostly steady voice), "Door's open. Come in."
Vikki blinked, surprised he'd answered and also surprised that it surprised her. Given how everyone had been sleeping (badly), she'd thought that there was a good chance Valentine might be catching up on much-needed sleep. There was also the chance he'd be occupied with Mary Ann—
Don't. Don't go there. Leave them their privacy.
Vikki heard his desk chair squeak through the door and not the creak of the bed frame. Relieved, she put her hand to the latch and walked inside. His cabin was a little less cluttered thanks to the organization she and he had imposed on it. She eased around the door, shut it, and leaned against it, keeping her hand on the latch for a fast exit if needed.
"I hope I'm not intruding or anything, but … I really think I owe you an apology, Val." Vikki looked at him through her lashes, thought he looked haggard, and she regretted her decision to knock on his door. He looks horrible. God, how come I didn't see that sooner? I'm an idiot. "I … I'm sorry. You're tired. I should—I should go."
She pulled the latch down and eased the door open again.
"Don't leave, please." Val said quietly as he looked up at Vikki. "You had a reason for knocking on my door, and hopefully my clearly horrible appearance has not completely scared it out of you." He looked a lot worse than he realized if Vikki was basically out the door at the first glance at him.
He stood up and moved over to the bed to sit down, offering her the desk chair with a casual gesture. "Have a seat. If you want, of course."
Vikki shut the door with a soft click and took the seat offered. It was warm from him sitting in it and she had to take a deep breath to settle her insides. It took a minute. They kept firing off little thrills through her belly.
"I realize this might sound like sucking-up but … I didn't want you to die and think that I hated you or anything. I mean, die from getting eaten by the Reavers and—oh, geez, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up. I'll change the subject. Um … I'll keep it short." She gusted a breath and tried again. "You said that we all need to cross train. I have a gun. I don't know how to shoot it. You do. Would you teach me?"
She bit her lip and looked him in the eye, hoping he didn't think her nuts. Or stupid. Or just trying to score brownie points with the Boss.
"*Do* you hate me? You'd have some cause." Val didn't think she did. And he'd be the worst kind of fool to teach a woman who hated him how to shoot a gun better. That was the road straight to tragedy. But he didn't want to brush off the argument they had been having. The Reavers didn't get to be an excuse for him to avoid handling his own mistakes.
"No!" She couldn't help it. The word leapt out of her as if on fire. Mortified, utterly convinced she was doing this badly, she clapped her hands to her face, shook her head, and said through her fingers in a much softer tone. "No. I could never hate you, Val. Be angry at you, yes. Frustrated, yes. But hate you?" She could feel the words rising in her throat, the ones that would damn her for a fool: I love you. She swallowed them down and the strain made her voice thin. "I can't."
Val smiled softly. This soon after the Reavers, he didn't have a big smile in him, but Vikki deserved what he could give. "I'm sorry, Vikki, I used your word even though I knew you didn't mean it that way." He ran his hands through his hair as he took a deep breath. What he was about to say was going to be painful to hear himself say, but it needed to be said. He just hoped it didn't hurt her too much. His feelings for Vikki were all tangled up between reality and imagination, between responsibility and expectation.
"But maybe you should hate me at least just a little, Vikki. I used your emotions for me to make sure we could get out of a tight situation." He face had a rueful look on it as he looked at his young engineer. "And I can't lie to you and say I wouldn't do it again. I'm going to use people. Kindly, if possible, but still I will use them. That's not the behavior of a nice guy. The kind of guy who you deserve to find for yourself someday." Had he ever thought himself a nice guy?
"I can't hate you, Val, but I can hate what you do. Like now." Vikki gestured at him, not quite pointing, not quite waving the matter off. "Why do you do that? Why do you keep painting yourself as an unredeemable ass when you're not?"
It really bothered her when Valentine tore himself down to something less than he really was. It wasn't false modesty that made him do it. It was something else. If she were a betting woman, Vikki would have put her money down on his heart having been broken in the past. Who had broken it, she had no idea, but she didn't need to know to see how wounded it had left him. All she needed to know was she had to convince him that he had a chance at making it whole again. If she could do that, if she could fix his heart, she could finally put the matter to rest. Even if he took his mended heart and gave it to someone else, she could live with that, happy for his happiness even if it didn't involve her. It was the ultimate paradox: loving someone so much you wanted them to be happy and loved by someone else even more than you wanted to be happy and loved back by them.
He did a little head startle of surprise. It was nice seeing Vikki push back a little. "Unredeemable ass feels a little strong to me. But I'm the person I need to be. Right now, this ship doesn't need me to be nice." Poco, he thought, would say that he was already way too nice for his own good, "Being nice has been what's gotten us into trouble. Being not nice has been what has gotten us out of trouble." There was a life lesson in there somewhere for a wiser man.
"See Black Rose sitting on the desk right near your elbow?" he asked, swiveling conversational direction quickly. "Pick it up and bring it over here," he asked, standing up from the bed.
"Being not nice may have gotten us out of trouble." Vikki stood up as well, but she wasn't done. "I'm grateful for that. But there's being not nice to get out of trouble and there's being not nice to get out of living like a normal person. So which is it, Val? What are you trying to get out of? Trouble? Or living?"
"I don't notice you picking up the gun," he said, with a bit of a smirk. "It's not loaded, if that helps."
Vikki recognized a redirect when she heard one, but did as he asked. Ooh, she's heavier than she looks. How much heavier is she when she's filled with bullets? She curled her fingers around the grip, felt the balance and the weight, and brought it over there. "Okay, so here's the gun. I did as you asked but you still haven't answered my question."
"Now, get into a shooting stance." Val deliberately continued to ignore her question for the moment. He helped her position her feet correctly and adjusted her arms into a two handed grip that supported the weight of Rose. As he intended, all that positioning forced him into a series of constant touches. Moving her arm here, adjusting her leg there and all the while standing close. When her stance was right, he stood right behind her, wrapping his arms around hers, helping her to guide the gun, his face so close to hers that they were almost touching cheek to cheek. "Now, Vikki," he said quietly but firmly, "tell me honestly what you're feeling right now."
"You." As before, the word leapt out of her. The entire time he'd adjusted her stance she'd been intensely aware of him, of the warmth of his hands tracing heat trails through the air and across her body. She could smell the soap he'd used and the scent of something else, something indefinably him. When he leaned in and spoke, his breath on her neck nearly made her jump right out of her skin. Which was, she realized, one of the reasons why he'd done it. "Honestly, I understand it's a test, Val. But why are you doing it? What's the point?"
She bit her lip and kept her gaze straight ahead. If she turned to look at him, it would put her mouth right next to his and that would lead to all sorts of trouble.
"A nice person would have just agreed to teach you. A nicer person would've just sent you to Poco to get trained. But this," he said, stepping back away from her, "is what I do. I use people's emotions and desires to make a point...to get them to do what I want them to do." A sad look crossed his face. "...What I need them to do.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm not an evil mastermind. I'm not a bad guy. Poco can attest to that. But am I a nice man? I don't know." He took the gun out of her hands, feeling the familiar heft. "But what I do know is I am what I need to be."
"Why?" Vikki asked, turning around to look at him. Now that he was no longer that close to her, she was able to think without him clouding her senses. "Why that method, Val? What makes you think it's necessary? Are you sure that it's what you need to be? Or do you just think it's safer for you to be? Easier, even."
She took a step closer and searched his face, her eyes wide in her desire to understand what drove him.
"Life doesn't have to be a contest, Val. I'm not an adversary. You don't have to do this. You don't have to play that game with me. Ever. And I won't play games with you. Just …," she paused and took a deep breath. "You told me once that I was your safe haven on this ship. Do you remember that?"
"I remember." What Vikki didn't quite get was that it wasn't about playing games. He didn't think of it that way. It was about being responsible for those that needed him, starting with his crew.
"Then tell me what you meant by that." Up went her chin and her eyes went hard. This was the answer she wanted above all. "And don't lie to me."
"Everyone on this ship expects things out of me," Val said. "And, of course, all of them expect *different* things. It was true at the Golden Dragon too, but I wasn't the top of the food chain there."
He looked directly into those eyes, those deep pools of brown of hers as he tried to explain. "You are...were(?) the only person on board that didn't expect anything out of me. You just trusted in me to do the right thing, despite the fact that I probably didn't deserve that trust."
And there was her answer. Does he really think that little of himself? That he's that unworthy? Heartsick and appalled, she felt her jaw drop and let it fall. There was no hiding what she felt. There was no stopping her tongue, either, apparently. "What did she do to you?" she whispered.
Ah, his mother. She, like everyone in his family, was a complicated topic. Val had viewed the situation from her lens for most of his life. But, now he was on board Delilah and responsible for a new family. He had been re-evaluating ever since. "She didn't do anything, Vikki. I made my own choices, as much as anyone can. You think I'm broken?" He asked it calmly, without baggage.
Vikki watched him closely, tracked his thoughts as best she could. He could be so inscrutable at times, but right that moment, she felt he'd set aside the mask. So she answered the only way she knew how: from the heart and to hell with the consequences.
"We all are." Vikki stepped closer. "Every last one of us. On every world. Everywhere. Broken. Imperfect. Needing. Searching." She took his hand, tracing bone and sinew with a fingertip. "But that's why we're here, Val. We are the Universe trying to understand itself, its thoughts made manifest, searching for answers. We all have a tiny piece of the answer. We're fixers, healers, lovers, and thinkers. Poets, artists, soldiers, and singers. We're destroyers, thieves, and murders, too."
She looked up. "Good and bad. In all of us. It's when we come together that the most interesting questions are asked … and the most interesting answers surface. We're all here to help each other find those answers. Running away from it only denies that discovery."
She squeezed his hand. "I'm running toward something, Val. I don't know what, exactly, but I'm going forward. You've stepped up and taken on this ship and this crew … but why do I get the sense that you're still running away?"
Was he running? Val would've said no if you had asked him three months ago. He had always pictured himself as the responsible one, like his mother, not his father. But the lines weren't that clean anymore. The definitions of who his mother was and who his father was weren't so clean cut either. If he was running, what was he running from?
"One of the reasons why I like you, Vikki. You believe in *people*. It's a good trait to have." He walked over to the desk and put Black Rose back down on top of a pile of papers.
"Do you still want me to train you? Or do you think it'd be better to have Poco do it?"
He pulled away and Vikki let him slip through her fingers without resistance. She wasn't trying to capture him. She was trying to understand him. One thing she was coming to understand: there was still too much about him she didn't understand. Yet, she thought perhaps she was getting a feel for him.
Case in point: He could have refused to teach me. Instead, he's letting me choose. Why? Is it because he wants to know what I want? Or is it his way of asking for what he doesn't dare ask for himself? Aware that it could be another test, Vikki nevertheless followed her heart, trusting in the good she saw in him, no matter how much he warned her of the bad.
"You." One word. Nothing more.
Val nodded firmly. He hadn't been sure what she would decide. But if he wanted his crew to trust him, he had to trust them first. "Okay. Meet me tomorrow in the cargo hold. We'll head out and find ourselves a range or someplace where you can learn with live ammunition."
Trying to figure out his own problems was the task for another day. He had more than enough fix on this ship. He could start with getting it right between him and Vikki.
"Tomorrow," Vikki agreed, sensing they'd come to the end of their conversation, even as she felt something else begin. "I'll be there."
"I know you will." If there was one thing he knew about Vikki, he thought, it was that she didn't do anything halfway.
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