Bruises

Posted on Fri Mar 15th, 2019 @ 10:39pm by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox

Mission: Gaia Reborn
Location: Deck 8, Crew Quarters
Timeline: 2396

Looking In the long bathroom mirror of her quarters, Lieutenant Mnhei'sahe Dox struggled to pull off the form-fitting, unyielding black undersuit of her EVA armor after a particularly brutal training session in the armories holosim suite. It was an exercise In sword fighting with Commander Rita Paris under the tutelage of the Baroness Schwein von Alcott.

As a fellow Baroness herself with the Captain's Artan pirate family, sword fighting was something the rotund Romulan was going to need to drastically improve with if she hoped to be useful in Enalia Telvan's upcoming tribunal. An attempt to wrest control of the Artan family from Enalia's tyrannical mother, the current Pirate Queen. And since Rita Paris had volunteered to be the Captain's conscience during the upcoming trials, she wanted training as well.

And today, the training involved fighting through a horde of holographic zombies armed with medieval weapons. As Dox finally pried the skin tight black mesh material of her EVA undersuit off of her shoulders, she winced slightly. Turning to look revealed a deep, greenish black bruise along her right shoulder blade about thirty centimeters across.

During the exercise, Dox had absorbed a mace blow to her shoulder from one of the creatures. And while her armor protected her from serious harm, the impact was enough to leave a mark. As she continued to strip, she inspected the rest of her body. Her knuckles had a similar greenish tint from bruises suffered in a similar Holodeck exercise with Paris wherein they engaged in a bar fight. Obstensively, these Holodeck excursions were because Rita had been asking the more skilled young Romulan for lessons on how to fight. But the litany of bruises up and down Dox's body confirmed that, ultimately, she had been enjoying the process.

Walking over to the replicator, Dox ordered up a basic pain reliever and ointment to relieve the bruising that Doctor Asa Dael had programmed for just such an occasion. Bruises were something Dox had more often than not, it seemed. And as much as she hated to admit it, she enjoyed what she did to get them.

Thanks to a chaotic, emotionally charged childhood, a complicated relationship with her Romulan heritage, and a repressed adolescent, Dox had clung to a lot of pent up anger that often expressed itself In self-harm. But she preferred to let that anger out in more aggressive ways. And bruises simply meant something got done, in her mind.

Of course, finding ways to hurt herself was nothing new to the anxious aviatrix. It had been a problem of some depth for most of her life. When she was a young girl growing up with her mother on the smuggling ship, the Forager, she used to sit in the airlock with her hand on the button to open the door to space. And when she was feeling just slightly less self-destructive than that, she began the bad habit of hitting herself.

It was a habit borne out of a depressing need to vent her anger and frustration but to not have that behavior noticed by her domineering mother. Jaieh Dox could be a cruel taskmistress that demanded exceptional behavior and performance out of her daughter in all aspects of life. Be it her general studies, the study of languages, piloting, or in the study of the Romulan martial art of Llaekh-ae'rl, the young girls mother accepted nothing but excellence and had no patience for her emotional well being or the festering seeds of self-loathing that had taken root in her.

Ordering up a hot honey tea from the replicator, Dox took it over to the couch where she threw her crimson robe on and sat down to look out the stars and wait for her newfound partner in all things, Mona Gonadie, to return from her shift on the Bridge. As she waited, her mind continued to drift back to her younger days before she had found the bizarre emotional stability of life she now enjoyed on the U.S.S. Hera.

Thinking of her mother, she thought of how she had learned that hitting a bulkhead could be heard throughout the ship. And hitting the flimsy pillow of her bedding didn't help her relieve any of the tension that felt like it was in a constant state of building in her stomach. It begged for release, and after a while she began releasing it on herself. Sharp punches to her own legs were where it started. Then her middle, and eventually it moved to a knee-jerk habit of punching herself in the face when her anxiety spiraled out of control. In spite of her intense physical training, she could never fully express her anger even there, under her mother's watchful eye.

She had to be an obedient Romulan girl.

So she hit herself in private, learning exactly how much force hurt enough to feel satisfying without leaving a visible bruise. After a time, the punching began evolving into smalling her head into anything that both hurt and was quiet. But both methods eventually left too many tell-tale signs. Swollen cheeks and the effects of ongoing, mild concussions began to become noticeable and the angry young girl found herself repressing even those outlets until all that was left was the airlock again.

Ultimately, Dox decided to live as was evident by her current presence on the Hera. She took a sip of her tea as she stared at the streaking stars of high warp and returned to her thoughts. She thought back to when she was new to Earth. Almost seventeen and freed of her life as a Smuggler after she'd sabotaged the Forager to get them caught by Starfleet, the young Mnhei'sahe Dox, then called Melanie, was sent to live with the parents of the human man she believed was her father.

It was a tumultuous period in her young life, where a newfound taste of freedom coupled with hormones and years of emotional repression exploded in a cocktail of instability. Thanks to surgical and genetic modifications she would only learn of years later, she didn't LOOK Romulan, but she still was and the locals never let her forget it. And while Terran standard was one of the languages her mother drilled into her aside from her native Rihan, she spoke with a thick and noticeable accent for years still.

Dealing with all of that and forced to not only attend a human High School in a small town in rural Ohio, but to also make weekly visits with a therapist to try and deal with her traumas, Dox learned many ways to fight against her situation. High School was a parade of a depressing combination of boredom and anger. The lessons felt remedial compared to her Mother's tutoring and she had to constantly struggle against her training that told her to brutalize those that were cruel to her. So she again had to find new outlets for her anger.

No longer under her mother's watchful eye, it was easy enough to slip away from her adopted Grandparents to practice Llaekh-ae'rl. A nearby barn housed bails of hay and a makeshift practice dummy and an easy to break into school nurses office made concealing bruises she'd given herself easy enough. And an overly active nightlife gave her plenty more opportunities to practice as she found herself hovering as close to her old life as a smuggler on her own time as she could, which left her knuckles regularly bruised. She wasn't happy, but she was at least letting her anger out to play.

Of course, the thing about anger is that releasing it doesn't make it go away. It just feeds it and makes it stronger. Which made her behavior at school worse and her forced therapy sessions even less productive. Dismissively, she would either say nothing for an hour or speak in Rihan exclusively just to be antagonistic. It was a long and slow downward spiral that seemed to be heading in a very bad direction.

But on the Hera, things were better. In spite of Dox's immense stress over the upcoming mission and her fears over potentially not surviving it, she actively wanted to survive. She had been building something she had never truly felt before and she wanted to keep it. She had friends, she had the beginnings of true family and a place that felt like what a home was supposed to. So why was she still so angry all the time? Why did she feel this unending need to let out the long simmering anger inside of her to her own detriment?

Stiffly, she pulled herself up from the couch and began slowly walking around the quarters that we now shared between herself and Mona Gonadie, looking at some of the new decor Mona had decorated with. Along the far wall were the two shelves Dox herself had put in. But they were now much more filled. There was a selection of brilliantly colored Miradonian plants that reminded her of her mate. On the shelves, were framed photos.

The photos of Dox and her mother remained, along with the photo of the command crew as it was when Dox joined the ship, with too many faces now gone after only a few months. In a larger frame, a 3-D image of Dox and Mona from Thex and Tathaa's wedding just a few weeks ago, broad smiles across their face as Asa Dael could be seen leaping up in the background to get into the picture.

Also on the shelves were the crystal eggs Dox had gifted Mona on their second date and the faux-wooden base of the holographic parrot Mona had given Dox on their first date. Looking at the pictures made the red-headed Romulan smile, thinking of everything she now had and everything she now had to lose.

Across the room on the dining room table was the weathered box that contained the twin, curved Caitian blades that the Baroness had gifted Dox earlier. As she looked at it, she thought back to the combat she had just been involved in and she hated herself just a little for enjoying herself. She would be lying to herself if she didn't admit that she still enjoyed going to the Holodeck to fight in holographic bars. She didn't want to admit it, but she liked it. She liked the release. And that scared her.

It scared her because she didn't want to be that person anymore. She didn't want to become her mother. To be a smuggler or a criminal... or a killer.

What she wanted was to be a woman. A Starfleet officer. A partner worthy of Mona's love. A friend to those that trusted her. She wanted to be better, but as she walked, her back spasmed in pain slightly to remind her that she still had far too far to go.

She still had too many bruises. Bruises on the outside...

And on the inside.