Them's Fightin' Words

By: Amanda

The woman had a name. She should know- she’d heard it enough over the past few days. “Soren”. That was the woman’s name-if you could call her a woman. Deanna Troi certainly did not. Soren was everything a woman wasn’t. Her short cropped hair and bulgy eyebrows were as masculine as the day was long and Deanna couldn’t help it if she noticed. Her flat-chested and square figure was, well, less than feminine. She was certainly not Will Riker’s type. Will Riker tended to waste his romantic attentions on vacuous beauties and admittedly loose women. He certainly had never been known to keep company with ugly girls before. And Deanna couldn’t help but think Soren was about as ugly as any woman she had ever seen. Deanna knew this was terribly closed-minded of her and completely out of character for the ship’s counselor; but she didn’t rightly give a damn.

All she cared about was hat Will had found some way to fall for the pale little, flat-chested, square-hipped, bulgy-eyebrowed , alien half-girl. And it made her want to spit. He had seen something in this “woman” that he liked. He had been attracted to “her” somehow. EEEWWWWW! It gave Deanna a classic case of the heebie-jeebies to even imagine the two of them together. And yet her mind kept taking her there. She comforted herself, though, with a hearty and sustained chuckle at the thought of the awkward moment when they learned that Humans and J’naii are NOT, in fact, sexually compatible. Yes, that would be a funny moment. Somewhat “funny ha-ha”, and definitely “funny-strange”. What she would have given to be a fly on the wall at that moment.

Although, she was at least pretty sure that moment had never come. Soren had gone back down to her planet and Deanna was reasonably certain that Will hadn’t had much chance to give her a proper “Will-the-thrill-Riker” goodbye.

But then Will Riker had done the dumbest thing he had ever done; the dumbest thing he could possibly have done; he went after her. The bastard had run down to the planet as fast as his fickle little feet could carry him. He had made a complete ass of himself in front of the ruling body on J’naii and then, when it hadn’t worked, he had tried to kidnap Soren. He actually offered to bring her aboard the ship and take her with him wherever he went. What the hell had he been thinking anyway? Then again, it really WOULD have been funny if she had accepted and THEN he found out about their complete sexual incompatibility. Boy, would he have kicked himself for that one!

Deanna would have gladly offered to kick him herself, regardless, if she thought she could face him right now. She just wasn’t sure how she’d react to his misery, which she could sense from all the way down the hall. She might just laugh. She might cry. But most likely, she would have broken every breakable object she could reach over his numb skull. And that would have been bad. She was not about to lose her cool in front of Will Riker- not over this anyway. She had vowed to herself a million times that she would never let him know, not ever, when one of his lame-brained short-term romances got to her.

And this one had definitely gotten to her. It bugged her on a level she didn’t know she was able to be bugged on. It made her feel like she needed some cheery touch of violence to calm her down. Not even her usual respite, chocolate, had put a dent in the irk in her brain- not that she hadn’t tried repeatedly to get it to work. She had momentarily entertained the notion to burst into his quarters, slap him square in the jaw and then tackle him and fuck his brains out just to remind him what a real woman was. She had decided, however, that that was also not the best idea.

She could always go to him, comfort him, be a friend in his time of need, and systematically re-program him to realize that the damned “woman” wasn’t even pretty. “She” didn’t even have breasts! Will Riker was a breast man and Deanna happened to know that as an indisputable fact. What the hell was Soren that Will Riker was momentarily willing to give up breasts for the rest of his life??? Huh? What? She was a damned androgynous shuttle pilot with bulgy eyebrows, that’s what. Deanna knew better than to talk to him right now. She was almost certain “flat-chested” or “bulgy eyebrows” would escape her lips and she knew that Will wouldn’t exactly appreciate that.

But, then again, a god healthy fight with Will would probably cheer her up. Hell, it might cheer him up, too. It was one of the more enjoyable idiosyncrasies of male-female communication that their fights usually ended with each of them thinking they had won.

She might just have to go and pick a fight.

End