And yet, with all the buildup in his mind, in his body, he didn't know that he would press his lips against hers until he actually did it. Had no idea that he would grab her with a fierceness that astounded even him, pulling her body up against his, feeling the hard shape of her beneath the clothing, the tautness of her flat stomach and lean muscles. He felt her gasp into his mouth and then she returned the ferocity of his kiss with an intensity of her own. . ..
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CHAPTER
9
Wo
rorf hadn't been completely certain what to expect upon his arrival at Lwaxana Troi's house, but the sight of Lwaxana in battle gear certainly wasn't it.
It was a fairly warm morning, as most were on Betazed. The grass was still wet from the dew, and Worf unaccountably felt a certain spring in his step. For no reason that he could really determine, he was filled with an odd faith that everything was going to work out. That confidence lasted up until the point that Lwaxana opened the door, at which point he decided that all bets were off.
The fact that she had answered the door herself rather than having Mr. Homn do it was surprising enough. But her garb and demeanor were nothing like what Worf was accustomed to. She was wearing no makeup, and her long hair was tied back with a cloth. She was wearing a formfitting, one-piece blue outfit, with heavy padding around the shoulders, upper chest, and upper arms, and hips. In either hand, she was holding a long staff, with what appeared to be lights at either end of each staff. The lights were not on, however.
In addition to her workout armor, she was also smiling.
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I M 2 A D I II
Worf wasn't quite certain which he found to be more disconcerting.
Worf decided to comment on the less obvious of the two unusual aspects of Lwaxana Troi that he was encountering. "Good morning, Mrs. Troi. You seem in a good mood today."
"Please, it's 'Lwaxana.' Let's not be so formal. And yes, as a matter of fact, I'm in a very good mood. Come in, come in," and she gestured for him to follow. He did so, allowing himself the briefest of moments to try and determine whether this was, in fact, Lwaxana Troi, or instead a rather brilliant impostor.
"The reason I'm in a good mood is that I just heard from Odo."
"Odo?" He frowned. "Security Chief Odo?"
"Oh, I should have realized you'd know of him. He's in the same line of work as you. He's a law enforcement officer on Deep Space Nine. Have you ever been there?"
"Yes, but I am not especially fond of space stations."
"Really?" She glanced over her shoulder at him. "Why not?"
"I do not like being aboard a stationary target."
"Worf, Worf, Worf," she sighed, "does everything with you have to be defined in military terms?"
"Yes."
"Well, at least you're honest. Anyway, Odo and I, we have a rather ... special relationship. I just received a vid from him this morning. Would you like to see it?"
"No-"
"Then I'll tell you about it. 'Mrs. Troi,'" Lwaxana recited from memory, in a musical timbre, " 'I am in receipt of your latest communication. While I am certain that you considered your remarks to be flattering, I have to tell you that the desires you have expressed are misplaced and that our continued correspondence is going to prove increasingly uncomfortable for us both .. . particularly, it seems, for me.' We have a very
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special relationship, Odo and I," she said to Worf, back in her normal voice.
"'Despite your impressions to the contrary, we have no relationship beyond friendship,'" Lwaxana continued, returning to her musical speech. "'. . . and at this point, at the risk of injured feelings, I must say that even that affiliation is becoming increasingly tenuous. Please ... if you must continue this correspondence, do so in a more formal and strictly platonic manner . . . and preferably, with a message that consumes somewhat less time than . ..'" Lwaxana paused, remembering. "'.. . ninety-three minutes and eighteen seconds.'"
Finished, she turned to Worf and seemed unaccountably happy. "You may not have been able to tell from that, but that was positively tender compared to our earlier communiques. He is definitely starting to come around. Isn't he marvelous?"
"His candor is admirable . . . albeit wasted," Worf observed. "What species is he?"
"I'm not entirely sure. I don't know if he knows, either. He is a shapeshifter, however. And a brilliant law-enforcement individual. If you're ever in a difficult situation, he's your man . . . well. .. he's your ... whatever .. ." Then, as if she'd promptly dismissed him from her mind, she said, "All right. . . this way, Worf."
She guided him to an outdoor area with towering trees that provided a good deal of shade. There was a wide patio lined with colorful mosaics. Worf found his attention drawn to the mosaics for no reason that he could really discern. There was just something about them that captivated the eye. There was one section, however, that seemed to have been specially prepared. It was a rectangular area about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, and as opposed to the rest of the patio, it seemed to be composed of a spongy, rubbery material. Lwaxana stepped to the far end and indicated, with a wave of one of the staffs, that Worf should stand at the opposite end. He did so, getting the sick feeling that he knew where this was going.
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"Why are you here, Worf?" asked Lwaxana. She was standing some feet away from him, and holding the two staffs in a relaxed position so that they were crisscrossing each other.
"I promised I would be."
"Are you happy about it?"
"That is irrelevant."
"Happiness is never irrelevant, Worf."
"Of course it is. Oftentimes, in fact. The first obligation of life is duty. Happiness is not a factor in that."
"But if you derive no happiness from it, then what's the point?" She seemed genuinely puzzled.
"'Happiness,' if you insist upon the term, comes from knowing that one's duty has been fulfilled."
"But knowing it isn't enough. For example, it is the duty of a Daughter of the Fifth House to have a daughter of her own to carry on the traditions of the House. But if I were not happy about having Deanna ... if I regarded motherhood simply as a fulfilled duty, and nothing beyond that, then what sort of mother would I be?"
"A Klingon mother."
She sighed and shook her head. "Worf... be honest with me___"
"Have I a choice?"
"No," she said in a practical tone. "You think there's nothing you can learn from me, don't you."
He didn't reply.
"You think," she continued, "that because Betazoids love peace . . . and introspection ... that we are weak."
"I would not marry Deanna if I thought Betazoids were weak."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps you simply regard her as the exception to the rule. Or perhaps you do see her as weak .. . and inferior . .. and therefore easy for you to control and no threat to your dominance."
"That is not true!" he bristled.
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"All right," she said calmly. "But now let's see ... if I can teach you a few things. Things about our philosophies, about our way of life. And maybe, just maybe . . . they'll be things you can apply to the way you live your life as not only the husband of a Betazoid, but as a Klingon." She tossed him one of the two staffs and he caught it effortlessly. Then she brought the remaining staff up to a horizontal position, resting it comfortably between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
Worf gaped at her in undisguised astonishment. "Are you suggesting we fight?"
"You think Betazoid philosophies make us weak. Ripe for conquest. I want to show you otherwise. We were not always the thoughtful philosophers and sensitives that you know us as now. We had our wars, we had our violence. We learned the importance of growing beyond that. You will, too." She indicated the ends of the staffs. "This is a little game called B'thoon. The lights at the end of the staffs illuminate when they come into contact with your opponent. Moves can be to anywhere, but only a strike between
the neck and waist counts as a point."
"I do not want to hurt you."
"Don't worry. You won't."
She spoke with surprising confidence. With a mental shrug, Worf took a stance, holding the rod out in front of him and endeavoring to look as challenged as he could considering his opponent was a middle-aged Betazoid woman.
Lwaxana let out a battle cry, whirled the staff in a dazzling spin, and came at him.
Worf s staff smacked her squarely in the stomach and lit up. Lwaxana hit the ground like a sack of rocks and lay there for a moment, gasping.
"Are you injured?" Worf asked. He extended a hand to help her up.
Lwaxana, all pride and wounded dignity, waved him off. She placed the bottom of the pole on the ground, pushed upward and got herself standing up. She took a deep breath and finally
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managed to say, "You're quick, Worf. I'll grant you that. And I'm just a little rusty. But I"-and she rallied her confidence- "was B'thoon champion of my graduating class. You won't catch me quite that easily again."
Once more she took a defensive stance, approaching him more cautiously this time. Worf didn't even move. He simply remained with his feet rooted to the ground, tracking her with a slight angling of his torso. She came in fast with a quick series of strikes aimed at the chest and arms. Worf blocked them without too serious an effort, ducked a swing of hers that went wide, and used the opportunity to angle his staff between her ankles and trip her up. Lwaxana's feet went out from under her, and she thudded to the ground. The spongy material absorbed much of the impact, but Lwaxana still looked jolted.
This is absurd, he thought.
Lwaxana got back to her feet a bit more slowly but no less determinedly. Her hair was somewhat askew and starting to get into her way. She pushed strands aside and readied herself. "Again."
"Lwaxana. . ."
"Now!"
Three, four quick exchanges, and this time he hit her just under the rib cage. It didn't knock her down, but the end of the staff lit up.
"Again," she said, her anger clearly building.
Again the staffs clacked together. This time Worf pivoted, dodging a full-bore charge by her, and struck her in the back just under the third vertebra. She spun around, and there was cold fury on her face. "I can do this," she declared.
"Lwaxana ..."
"I can do this!"
She came at him again.
And again.
And again.
Each time he deflected her blows, or dodged them. A couple of times she came close to tagging him, but close was all she
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managed. Over and over he would nail her after a few exchanges, without working up any real exhaustion over it.
He kept waiting for Lwaxana to quit.
She wouldn't.
Her face, her clothes became soaked with sweat. Her breath became more tortured. Her movements slowed, each repetition more filled with effort than the one before. For Worf it became painful to watch. When she had fallen nearly three dozen times, Worf started to get genuinely concerned. It was not going to look good to Deanna if her fiance killed his prospective mother-in-law. He was doing the best he could to control the severity of the impact with which the staff was striking her, but Worf was not accustomed to moderating the force of his blows. Klingons did not, as a rule, fight for the purpose of wounding.
So much perspiration was rolling off Lwaxana's brow that she was blinking furiously to keep it out of her eyes. Her hair was hanging, matted, around her face. She tried to stand in one place as she planted herself for the next go-around, but she was wobbling. She took a moment to steady herself and Worf waited.
"Lwaxana ... quitting is an option," he said.
There was a deep rasping in her throat, as if all the moisture in her body was on the outside and there was none left within. "You ... first.. ." she said.
With that one sentence, that one defiant utterance, Worf understood what was at stake for her. She wasn't simply battling him. She was also fighting the memory of her own youth, of what she once was. Lwaxana Troi was a woman who thrived on self-esteem in the same way that others thrived on oxygen and light.
You first, she had said.
Well, that was all it would take, really. All Worf had to do was give in. Say that he'd had enough. Be the first one to back off.
He opened his mouth to say it...
... and the words stuck in his throat.
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Quit? To hell with that. Lwaxana was battling demons of her youth. So what? Worf had to deal with that every day, and one didn't deal with that by giving up.
Slowly he shook his head and brought his staff up defensively again. Lwaxana grunted in acknowledgment that the battle was to continue. She licked her chapped lips, not doing much in the way of wetting them, and steeled herself for another attack.
In a surprising move, she swung at his legs. He vaulted over it, hit the ground rolling, blocked a return thrust by her, and hit her in the stomach again . .. lighter than the first time, but she still felt it. She bent over, staggering away from him, trying to regroup. And he heard her muttering something to herself, doing it so quietly that he was reasonably sure she didn't know he'd heard it.
"Just once," she was saying under her breath, "just once . .."
Just once.
Well, that was really all it would take, wasn't it. The woman had her pride, but certainly she knew she was overmatched by this point. A pain in the ass Lwaxana Troi could be, but insane she most definitely was not. At this point, she was battling not with any hope of truly overcoming him or teaching him some profound lesson about just how tough Betazoids were. Instead she was fighting purely out of vanity. She couldn't withdraw from the field without managing to nail Worf at least once. He could even see the Lwaxana-skewed way that she would tell others of the battle: "There we were, a Klingon warrior and I, slugging it out with our B'thoon staffs, and suddenly, boom! Got him square in the chest!" Naturally she would leave out the three dozen or so strikes that he got her with first.
And it wasn't just for the retelling, either. If he let her get him once (without her realizing, of course, that he had allowed it) then it would go a long way toward restoring her sense of self-worth.
Just the one shot. Just the one.
Just throw one engagement. Move a hair too slowly, react a
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second less quickly, and she would tag him on the arm or somewhere, gain a point, and have a moral victory that would enable her to step back and announce, "Now we're done."
He saw her readying herself for another charge. She took two quick steps-or at least what passed for quick at that point- and then feinted a strike to the head. As feints went, it was fairly pathetic. She had telegraphed it; it was rather clear to Worf that what she was intending to do was reverse the direction of the staff and make her genuine attack to the chest, probably to the solar plexus. But all he had to do was be "fooled" by the feint. Bring his staff up, block it, and that would leave him open for Lwaxana to hit him.
All this went through his mind in a second.
Lwaxana's staff arced toward his head, and Worf made as if to block it. And then she reversed the staff and tried to strike him squarely in the chest.
The thrust came up several inches short of its target... the reason being that Worfs hand had snaked out and snared the staff about a foot from the end, away from the sensors so that it didn't register as a hit. Lwaxana's staff was held immobile by the Klingon's superior strength and then Worf shoved her staff right back at her. But he had overestimated his strength and the amount of resistance Lwaxana had left. The staff slid right through her sweat-soaked palms and struck her squarely in the forehead.
"Lwaxana!"
She stood there for a moment, wavering, her eyes blurring and then refocusing.
"Lwaxana, are you all right? Do you want to sit down?"
"Excellent idea, Pierre," Lwaxana announced. "The corn muffins look scrumptious today."
And with that utter non sequitur, Lwaxana fell forward like a tree. If Worf hadn't caught her, she would have hit the ground face-first.
"So how are the lessons going?" asked Deanna, her face bright and smiling on the vidcom.
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"As . . . well as can be expected," Worf replied, standing in the foyer of the Troi mansion.
"Do you feel you've learned anything?" She sounded almost playful with the question. Worf wondered just how playful Deanna would feel if she knew he'd nearly decapitated the Keeper of the Holy Rings of Betazed.
"Oh . . . yes."
"Like what?"
Desperate for an answer and looking for a way out, Worf fell back on possibly the oldest dodge in civilized history. "I... have to go ... I hear your mother calling."
"I didn't." Deanna looked puzzled.
Worf tapped his head. "In here."
"Oh. Of course, how foolish. Well, I'm just glad to know the two of you are getting along. See you tonight. Love you." And she blinked off.
Shaking his head, Worf went to Lwaxana's bedroom, where she was lying with what appeared to be some sort of green liquid-encased compress on her head which Mr. Homn had just placed there. She had switched to a simple white shift, and Worf saw bruises lining her upper arms. He winced inwardly but said nothing as he wondered just how angry she was going to be.
Without turning her head, her gaze went in his direction, and to his surprise her expression actually softened to one of- well, not affection, but not overt hostility. If anything she seemed a little . . . sad, somehow. "Sit down, Worf."
He turned to look for a chair and was mildly startled to see that Mr. Homn was sliding one in behind him. He had not even realized the giant manservant had stepped away from the bed, so silently and effortlessly had he moved. Worf couldn't help but wonder just how much there was about Homn that he didn't know.
Worf sat with his back ramrod straight. He had absolutely no idea what to expect.
"Tell me ... what you were thinking. Toward the end of our bout, I mean."