Part 17 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+ft, 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.