Grapevine
Posted on Sun Jan 30th, 2022 @ 11:00am by Caithlin t'Leiya & Cornelius Warner MS
3,801 words; about a 19 minute read
Mission:
Roll With It
Location: The Silver Tongue
Timeline: Right After Bar Closing Time
It was rather late in the evening, even considering the nature of the establishment; the last of the patrons of the Silver Tongue staggering out the door at closing time. And exactly one lithe figure in a draped purple-blue tunic over crisp black pants going the opposite direction, into the building, sliding up to one of the bar tables despite the hour and the 'Closed' sign on the door, and onto one of the tall chairs with the complete confidence (or at least projection of) of one used to commanding a space. A closer look, though, might have revealed some unraveling around the edges: Tendrils of hair swirling down here and there, escaping the intricate updo secured with the long, elegant inlaid hairpins like a geishas; wrinkles here and there in the silk of the tunic, where its occupant had spent too many long hours that day in one position, pouring over legal briefs and research.
"...Grapevine says we're sleeping together, apparently." Caithlin threw out both wryly and wearily by way of announcing herself to the few bar staff still present, and mainly, to the owner, who was putting a bottle back onto a higher shelf. "This probably won't help that misconception, but I'm not really sure I give a damn at the moment; this place seems determined to judge me regardless." Caithlin looked around the room, making sure it was empty, before continuing. "Both of us maybe for that matter; since the grapevine, or the local security opinion, also isn't sure we aren't both one step away from mass murder for engaging in self defense."
Dusting off his hands, Cornelius stepped off the stool he'd been on and turned to face the source of the voice. Of course he'd known it, and prior to that had been prepped to tell whoever had snuck in to fuck off. But his eyes twinkled a little at the sight of Caithlin as he approached the bar and pulled one of the bottles and a pair of shot glasses out to slide them across. "Kentucky bourbon," he said, pouring a shot eat and flicked the glass across to her effortlessly. "If we are going to commiserate, lets start easy." He knocked the drink back with little effort and spun around to scoop a record off the shelves and slid it into place.
"DEAD INSIDE" screamed out from the speakers, followed by a heavy bassline. The old Earth band Muse was a favourite of his, and the album Drones felt weirdly fitting. "Well according to Security I could have stopped when I had him on his back, punching his lights out was excessive force. But fuck him." He winked as he poured each of them another shot. "As for sleeping together, just a bunch of jealous stiffs who need something to fantasize about that isn't their boring lives." He laughed a hearty laugh and downed the rest of his drink. "So fuck them, I could use a friend to share a few drinks with."
Caithlin gave a precise little nod accompanied by the glint of a smile, and downed the offered shot in a way that somehow managed to be both abrupt and elegant. "...According to Security, I 'escalated the situation' by defending myself and my own, and it 'makes situations more dangerous' when civilians intervene in them. Nevermind that I have wielded a weapon longer than most of their mothers have lived. I may have provided them a reciprocal lecture to the young crewmen in turn thereafter, on the inherent danger already present when people are throwing rocks at you and beating on men outnumbered by dozens to one; the nature of the Federation legal code as to allowable self defense; and the justifications for it when those you would expect to come to your aid do nothing." This time it was a thin expression that was a 'grin' in name only as she downed the next shot he poured them. "Considering several of the rioters implied my brother in law was unfit for his position and that I am reckless with my offspring and my kin, the men who stated so should be very glad I am interested in following the dictates of Federation law." It was a very roundabout way of say 'otherwise I would have challenged them to duel, or maybe even just stabbed them'; but a plain enough implication if you were familiar with Romulans.
"Sounds like you showed more restraint than most Romulans," he said, switching out the bottle for another bottle - this time an Andorian Vodka - pouring out shots for one another and pounding it back. "Maybe they need a reminder of that," he said with a half snarl. His own sour mood was permeating his mind. His knuckled felt warm, still bruised as they were, and the quick shots of booze back to back were starting to warm him internally. "But hey, I'm a Romulan sympathizer, so maybe I'm a bad influence."
“More likely many would feel that I am the bad influence upon you.” Caithlin downed a shot of the new drink, feeling very little of it herself yet. “I admit I was optimistic that this would prove a better ‘fit’ as humans say, than Earth was. It even seemed so at first. I am…reconsidering that assessment, of late.” That there could be anything even approaching an acceptable or even tolerable ‘fit’ for a former senator and head of a Romulan great house among aliens and strangers in a strange land was in most cases laughable; that Caithlin would even entertain the concept was a sign she was well and truly perhaps more adaptable than most.
Cornelius shrugged. "Coreward you get more people willing to be snippy and rude behind your back, out here more people likely to leave you alone, but more borderworlders who still are far more racist than the posters would let you believe. But you also always know where you stand, so there is that." Cornelius had spent many years on the fringes, and while he had become used to the cozier life inward, he had always had a soft spot for the outer worlds. "Ups and down, depending on what you want. Lot of Federation types don't like the general blunt edge of out here." He glanced down at his knuckles. "Can't take a hit when they find out that being that blunt comes with a price either." He imagined a lot of the colony goers would seriously reconsider starting a bar fight in the Silver Tongue for a while, knowing that Cornelius could dish it out. His eyes glanced up to where Tamara was headed for the front door, herself pausing to look back him, a mix of concern and amusement across her face. He gave only the slightest twitch of his head to indicate he was fine before she nodded and headed out, locking the door on her way.
"Just you and me now," he said, pushing off the bar as the third song on the album came to life, another solid bass riff mixed with the gentle strokes of a keyboard. He slid a couple random bottles from the shelves, sliding them onto the bar. "Last chance to keep the rumour mill from getting out of hand."
“As a great deal less rests upon the outcome of the local gossip than I have been accustomed to; if they will judge me regardless; I am becoming less concerned with their opinions and their assumptions perhaps the more that they do so. Interesting, really; what humans seem to feel constitutes an…edge…to a place, or a person. To see such dire dangers in things I would have shrugged at by my second decade; and yet issue slights daily that would be dire indeed for us, and with next to no means provided or allowed for redress.”
"Gossip is key when you have nothing else going on, and powerful when you think you have a leg up," the bartender said with a smile. "Small colony folk need to feel they're important, so they'll make ups stories and tell rumours to get themselves into the know. And if they turn out to be right, then they get to have the last laugh and climb the social ladder. If they're wrong, there is no recourse."
"It is bizarre, that lack." Caithlin's voice was emphatic, and implied she found it more than a bit unsettling. "I am used to...'gossip'...and maneuvers alike, far more complex and involved than that, and with far higher stakes. But I am used to recourse; to both having it available to myself, and to knowing to expect it from others if I go too far. It is...Difficult to find the 'lines to color within' in your society, sometimes; for all some of you call ours too complex. It seems sometimes not that your rules are covert nor blatant so much as half the time they are in fact actually made up as one goes along." She took a shot of one of the more recently offered bottles with a smile of her own, considering what information she had been able to glean in her research to date; and what she wished to reveal or not herself. "When you operated an establishment at the Federation's embassy to the Empire, no doubt you had an opportunity to observe such situations at events you helped to cater..."
It was both a genteel way of saying that a dinner party or cocktail reception full of Romulan officials was a nest of Machiavellian vipers at best; and a test, to see if he would admit to having recognized her as an attendee of some of those events, as she had him as a member of the catering team; or to having done any research on her at all or knowing anything now of the general nature of her own past; since she had divulged her public name to him a few weeks ago on her first trip to the Tongue. Caithlin was so far entirely uncertain as to man's nature; but the fact remained that 92 years of life impressed on her even if he was indeed no more than 'just' a bartender now...Well. Good bartenders operated in a landscape of information and intrigue nearly as complicated sometimes as the political realm (and often intersecting with for that matter, on many worlds). Unless, of course, he had come here for some semblance or escape or safety from such...As she had.
Cornelius laughed, a good genuine laugh from finding something funny that others might not. "I loved watching Romulans and their social structure," he said, the words as genuine and true as any he'd spoke. "You always know where you stand with a Romulan, which is to say that there was no real trust present. I made friends of regulars, I frequented a great little Romulan restaurant down the way, and had one such Romulan vixen who'd come in once a week without fail. I am pretty sure she was a senator's aid, thought I was a scary spy. Cannot imagine how mad she was when she finally got me back to bed only to find out all my personal computer had was failed applications to the Romulus planners for a bigger bar, and some failed recipes..." He trailed off, thinking that night about the entire exchange. He also wondered if the Romulans had ever noticed the back trace... He'd woken up, quite by accident actually since the drug she'd tried to slip him had given him a wicked stomach ache, and he'd found her sitting at his console, the look of fear at being caught in her eyes.
"No, I have preferred the company of your people to those of my own many a time. You know there is subterfuge and mistrust, and there is a social pecking order to keep an eye out for at every turn. But if someone thinks they gain something by telling you a secret they heard about you, they are the first to come tell you, and in that you can always be completely candid if it is a lie or not. If anything, that is what I miss about nights on Romulus." He trailed off, thinking about having evacuate, leaving the doomed planet behind and knowing full well that the fate of it was already sealed. His smile faded slightly, and he sighed. "It wasn't perfect, hell as a human among Romulans I was out of place. But in all the lies and deceit, there was always a truth to it all."
"I felt the opposite about Earth, after a few years." Caithlin shrugged her eyebrows up and down. "Beneath or despite an almost aggressive posture of openness and acceptance, there is a good deal of judgement, and a exceptionally greater level of monitoring and restrictions than most Earthlings are ready to admit. I tired of being a conversation piece or an object of judgement for my mere existence, on a world where everyone to their very core insisted that that was not the case...and actually appeared to believe that. Because yes, in comparison I do often feel as if many of your kind...There are less overt secrets. But there are perhaps more of them kept from one's self; an unwillingness or perhaps actual inability to own one's own actions and choices; to face what is. If my kind weave a web to deceive others, far too many of yours weave it best to deceive themselves...then deny, even to themselves, that it exists at all."
It was another piece of the puzzle that had been--or was--Romulan society and culture: Amidst the wilderness of mirrors, an ironclad thread hinted at in aspects of law and practices, that one should take only those actions they were wiling to face the consequences of, if necessary; that all actions had such, and that you must own your choices, even if only sometimes to yourself. At it's most extreme one could see it played out in legal tenets like the Right of Statement; the expectation not that the condemned would attempt to plead for their life or deny their crimes so much as defend their commission of it and expound on and justify their reasons. If it seemed seated ill at ease sometimes against other aspects of the same culture, well: It did not seem so to Romulans, merely to outsiders observing.
"...I was attracted to colonies more on the outskirts of the Federation in part in fact for their seemingly high percentage often of those who fit more poorly within Earth--or if nothing else, those more willing to take their fate and their choices upon themselves, with the decisions and actions necessary to exist in such places." Now, Caithlin was in part taking, she knew, a piece from the human playbook she had shortly before been discussing: Offering an unusual level of openness herself; in certain aspects; wielding it almost as a defense in its disclosure against exploration of other areas she might more desire to conceal. "Not to mention a hope that such places as this would be less bound to the dictates of a single culture. I do not think most on Earth realized just how far I had already adapted and bent to their rules and their norms, when they passed judgement on the places where I had not." One corner of her mouth pulled up slightly. "Perhaps that is why I am drawn to this place--" Caithlin gave a tiny, subtle gesture indicating the bar, not the colony overall. "--to those who have ever seen even a small part of what I lost and left behind; and keep it in mind when evaluating the present." She tried the last of the shot glasses presented to her, swishing the liquor in her mouth for a moment, considering it, and perhaps a variety of other things as well. "What drew you here?"
Cornelius offered a shrug, pushing off the bar and pacing slightly. "Little of this, a little of that," he said with an air of nonanswer. "Core living is hard, I left Starfleet on good terms, hell all my integrity intact, I just happened to find something more my calling. The grand Federation promise is always "Do what you want, be happy but it's not really that true. Sure, you can do what you want, but public opinion is always a tool. These days people are very pro-Starfleet, at least when it serves their personal needs. They'll happily wave their banners and scream their freedoms. Many citizens don't actually know what it's like." He paused, kicking a bottle cap across the floor. "So eventually rumours start spreading, stories are told, and suddenly even if your record is a matter of public searchability, you're the bad guy. In the core, you aren't allowed to hit someone who decides your past is theirs to spread far and wide."
The bit about 'do what you want; be happy' was met with a soft chuckle of sorts from Caithlin and a clearly dubious expression: She had seen the results of trying to apply such a philosophy and lack of hard stops to the young of her own kind with how her eldest niece had turned out: Encouraged to find their own way and express themselves however desired and such with few more salient pointers or guide points or training on and exhortations towards personal control turned out poorly for a species far more intense at their baseline and core than most of humanity; led to a lack of control that was lucky all it had led in Kalahaiea's case was a collection of admirals with broken noses. With any luck, here on the outskirts, her younger nieces and her own children might have a chance to be raised in at least a somewhat more appropriate manner.
"That, yes." Caithlin said to the last bit. While the whole of the statement was as clearly evasive as it was informative, the final verdict spoke to heart of the some of the difference between the Federation's core and its edges that sounded as if it had in part attracted them both. "It is difficult to be unallowed even to strike with simply your fist those who commit such offenses; moreso when you have been used to being able to challenge them outright for it..."
It was for its own part also a matter of public record, inasmuch as those survived from even the Empire's post-nova days before its collapse, that during her time in the Senate and her briefer time also on the Continuing Committee, Caithlin herself had issued such challenges a variety of times; most of those instances shortly after the disaster itself, issued to fellow senators who unlike herself had been members of the body prior to the nova as well, not merely in waiting for it: Men and women she had laid accusations of treason and dereliction of duty against for failing to evacuate more of their people from the doomed core worlds; for saving their own skins and daring to survive despite that. That she was sitting at the bar now having this conversation was proof enough that she had been the victor in such encounters, and now she grinned widely.
"...Clearly most of the place remains quite unfamiliar with nearly any of my past, or they would think much more carefully before they speak against me in such ways and lay such insults." Caithlin turned an empty shot glass over in her hand, studying the way the light played off the glass, still debating with herself how much of that past was or was not known to the man before her. "Or perhaps that is another failing of your core worlds: Producing people who have been so conditioned they are safe that they fail to see danger even when it stares them straight in the eyes and announces itself." She shrugged. "Or who panic in the face of it, as they have never been trained for otherwise." She had, of course, seen too many of her own kind panic likewise; but as a general rule, the cause had to be far more dire and inescapable than the sort she'd seen many on Earth feel worth the response.
"You have been here a decent length of time, it would seem, as humans count it at least. What advice would you have for me, then, as to this place, and its occupants?" Caithlin would take whatever was offered with, as humans put it, more than a grain of salt (bizarre expression, that - someday she would have to take the time to track down the origin); but the bartender could speak from a place of having walked also on both the worlds she was asking he compare it to, making it a potentially useful data point to add to whatever she could glean from her own research or whatever was offered by Gunnar or Jason.
Cornelius poured himself a quick shot, and pounded it back fast. "Honest advice? Federation people love a kiss ass, and love to think they're winning. You want to get these people to like you, or at least leave you alone? Make them think they are winning against you, and you'll come up smelling like roses. Even if they're not. 'Slip up' and admit things they think they can gossip about. Make them think they're going to have a leg up, and they'll start to be easier around you. In short, be a little human." He shrugged. "Always worked for me."
"It is possible, of course, that in part it worked for you because you were human, or partly so." Caithlin shrugged back, in her case with the brief waggle of her brows up-and-down again. "Still. I will consider it. Thank you." She stood, a fluid motion no less practiced than her entrance had been, carefully placing the shot glass back on the counter as she gave Cornelius a just-so no and made her way to exit the bar, leaving him to his closing work as she mulled what she had learned here tonight, and just as much, what she had been unable to.
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