Imzadi_ Triangle Part 17

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 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 repet.i.tion 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.

Quit? To h.e.l.l 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 a.s.s 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 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 pa.s.sed 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 m.u.f.fins 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.

"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."

"Why do you ask?"

"Because I'm interested," she said matter-of-factly.

"No, I mean ... why do you not just tell me what I was thinking?"

She made a soft, impatient clucking noise in the back of her throat as if annoyed that he had to ask, "Worf... believe it or not, I am capable of turning my abilities on and off. This is supposed to be about you. If I tell you what was on your mind, it becomes about me."

"Very well. It may hurt your feelings ..."

"Hurt away," she said dryly.

"I felt... sorry for you. I thought you were pathetic."

"Good."

He blinked. "Good?"

"Yes. That's what I was going for. You don't seriously think I was under the impression that I could match you physically?"

"Well..." The question was clear on his face: What was the point of it all?

"What were your options? What were you considering, Worf? Faced with this pathetic, desperate old woman who seemed anxious to prove something to herself... what was going through your mind?"

"I... considered quitting."

"But you didn't."

"No. Then I considered allowing you to score a hit."

"And you didn't do that, either."

"No, I did not."

"Why?"

"Because ... I felt it would do you a dishonor. That you deserved only my best effort."

"Oh, tribblefur," snapped Lwaxana.

Had Worf been a Delian Optistalk, his eyes would have lunged out of his head. "What?"

"You heard me. Your decisions, your combat tactics, had nothing at all to do with my 'honor.' You just couldn't stand to show anything that could possibly be intrepreted as weakness.

To quit, or to allow me to score would have threatened your Klingon pride."

"That is not true."

"It most certainly is. Here you had a helpless opponent. You could have withdrawn. But you refused, even though you had nothing to prove. Then, toward the end, I muttered, 'Just once,' just loudly enough for you to hear. You could have figured out a way to allow me to score, to salvage my 'pride.' But your own pride wouldn't allow it. You put yourself and your sense of duty above everything ... in this instance, your duty to the Klingon code of honor, whether real or imagined. You couldn't allow a helpless woman even the most meager of triumphs against you because it would have been threatening to you. You had to fight; you couldn't refrain from it, could not justify it in your own mind no matter how much you tried. Your problem, Worf, is that you have too overpowering a sense of yourself."

Worf gaped at her. "With all respect, Lwaxana, when it comes to a sense of one's self, I do not believe I can begin to approach your own att.i.tude. How many times have we heard your a.s.sorted t.i.tles bandied about with pride?"

She sat up, but too quickly, because clearly from her perspective the room was tilting dangerously. She lay back, keeping the compress against her head. "A valid enough point, Worf, as far as it goes. However, I am capable of putting aside myself. If I didn't... do you think I could have willingly subjected myself to our little sparring match earlier? It's not always easy, I admit, and as I get older I get more set in my ways. But I do have the ability to reach into myself... and cast myself aside."

"I do not understand."

This time she sat up a bit more carefully. Next to her bed was a large vase of cut flowers, and ever so gently she reached over and extracted one. It was large and fragrant, and had many petals of a.s.sorted colors. She removed the stem and cradled the bud itself in the palm of her hand. "To be Betazoid ... is to be like this flower, Worf. Look at it. See the beauty of its shape? Its fragrance? See all the petals that surround it?"

He nodded.

Lwaxana then, one petal at a time, began to disa.s.semble the flower. She did so very carefully, and each petal would be removed only to reveal another of a different color. When she spoke it was so softly that Worf had to strain to hear her.

"Each of these layers," she told him, "compose the flower. Just as we ourselves are composed of different layers and varying textures. Our experiences, our personal histories, our likes and dislikes, are all part of it. But you cannot let yourself define yourself by these trappings. They are merely aspects of you that the outside world is able to see. But if you strip it all away ... what do you have?"

She held up her hand. It was empty. The petals lay scattered on the bed.

"You have ... nothing," said Worf.

But she shook her head. "Wrong," she said with a smile. "The flower is still here. I can feel it in my palm ... feel the texture of it, the slight weight. The fragrance of it stays with me. The core, the essence of it remains, even though it cannot be seen. You only believe in what you can see and touch, Worf. You believe in yourself. You have to be able to put yourself aside, to make yourself unimportant. Once you are nothing ... then you can become something."

"That is double talk," he growled. "Klingon honor can neither be seen nor touched. I believe in that."

"You believe in it because it is results-oriented. It gives you things of substance. By attending to that code of ethics, the result is t.i.tle, or properties, or higher rank, or makes you more desirable to the opposite s.e.x, or at the very least minimizes the ways another Klingon can try to kill you since any number of ways would be dishonorable."

"I do not appreciate your cavalierly dismissing my way of life."

"I'm not dismissing it, Worf. I'm just giving it some thought rather than accepting it blindly. Have you ever done that?"

His jaw twitched slightly, the muscles flexing in annoyance.

"Why did you kill Duras? What was the purpose?"

The question caught him off-guard. "How do you know of that?"

"It was on your service record. I read up on you last night. Jean-Luc officially reprimanded you. So... what was the purpose?"

"He killed K'Ehleyr, Alexander's mother."

"That was the catalyst for your killing him. Not the purpose."