Flashback/Test Scene:

[tasha_yar]

It was a nice simulation - all rolling hills and green grass. The sky was almost too blue, but Tasha didn't have the greatest color sense in the universe.

Picard had ordered her on a long break for everyone once the Enterprise returned to normal space after their time with the Traveler, and most of the crew was on well-needed shore leave on the world below. She tried going back to her normal comforts - working out, practicing with the aikido program, reading the latest reports. Hell, she even broke down and listened to Klingon opera in order to refine her grasp on the language.

It hadn't helped. The nightmares of being chased and caught with her senses blurred from any variety of drugs she could find making the dream-memories even more nightmarish and barely contained. They melded with the cage from her fight with Yareena. They blurred with Q's courtroom. And they had been blending with...that...ever since the Tsiolkovsky encounter.

It was all getting worse, not better, even as she felt herself wanting to settle in and make this a home. She was feeling her walls come up again - just like when she'd managed to do or say something stupid on her other postings. Lieutenant Yar could handle anything - minefields, riots, the criminally insane. Tasha made Wesley look like a goddamn sophisticated grown-up!

She sighed and looked at the holo-recorder in her hand. She stretched and pressed the button again. Self-pity wasn't going to get this done.

"Geordi, in those moments I felt the most despair, you took my hand and helped me to see things differently. You taught me to look beyond the moment."

Good. Solid. Decent. Sure, it felt woefully inadequate. It's not like she had a gift for words. With a silent apology, she moved onto the last person on the list. She'd splice this all together to put this in the middle - just to save some face somewhere. He wouldn't care, but she cared about the kind of idiocy he'd face.

"My friend Data," she starts on the speech she had planned. "You see things with the wonder of a child -" A smile plays across her lips. "And that makes you more human than any of us. And Data..." She hesitated. "Data, I..." Sigh, rewind, try again. "Data it did happen!" she manages to blurt out, followed immediately by a "Fuck!" Then a realization that was all being recorded again.

She flopped on the ground in defeat and impulsively threw the crystal hexagon back behind her.

"How about, 'Data, I'm sorry.' 'Data, I wish I wasn't so damn scared.' 'Data, I hope you didn't scar you for life so when you do find some person who is as wonderful and smart and fantastic as you are -" She growls in further defeat.

Then she realizes she never heard the holo-recorder land.

Comments

[humandroid]

He stares at the point of contact, mostly. Accesses relevant records, tips his chin upwards, then back down, and cautiously folds his fingers over. Distracted would be an apt word to describe him at current. Internal diagnostics and his self-correcting mechanism have made an abrupt rise in prioritization. Queries with no definitive answer are pressing matters: developments which require certain overseeing as they form.

This meeting is providing more new developments than he had anticipated.

Intriguing.

"Are you referring to our encounter or to the possibility of 'this between us' prior to it?"

[tasha_yar]

That snaps her out the fugue. Her eyes move from his, back down to the curled hands. Back up, then down. Her thought fall like twigs over a waterfall.

Emotionless Being.

Perfectly Logical.

Perfect Officer.

Prevented by the limits of programming and construction against giving or accepting hate or sadness. Or gentleness. Or joy. Or...

Nothing you do drunk...

Typical.

Don't know.

Encounter or possibility.

It would be safer if she ran. She's not running.

"This seems a bit more intimate then drunkenly fumbling around and then literally turning you off while -"

Nope. Can't finish that statement. He's blunt enough to follow up if he wants.

She tightens her grip. "I keep warning you. You deserve better than me."

[humandroid]

"I have found that the concept of what one is said to deserve is highly subjective. Logically, in terms of intimate interaction, I would most likely be considered the less than ideal companion of choice. After all, I cannot reciprocate an emotional bond. That creates a certain-- imbalance. You appear to be approaching the matter as most humans would."

More compliment than anything else, probably. As much as telling a human they act like a human can be considered such. That she was able to reactivate him without requiring an engineering consult (or several, who would then view his schematics and be privy to information he's made ready efforts to keep private)- and within forty seconds of initial shutdown, was a considerable feat on its own.

"Would it be beneficial to draw attention to my actively seeking you out at this time?"

[tasha_yar]

"Data," she murmurs. "I've known plenty of biological beings less human than you are. Don't argue the point. You...don't want to know."

She's not commenting on the emotional bond. He had her mind in overload at, "typically," and emotions are not her area either.

A memory surfaces from that night. The physicality was not her best - being both drunk and surprised. Data chattered away asking for preferences, which she tried shutting up with kisses that ended in drunken giggles while she still tried playing - badly - the role of dominant and knowing seductress. Still, none of her other partners had ever cared or asked about what she wanted. It was novel to say the least.

The drunken joke he'd managed about "turning him on," after the panic of having a denser-than-you'd-think android fall over her body was, even with all the guilt and confusion, something that still managed to be painfully funny in her memory. She'll take the memory of Data's possibly first under-analyzed smile at her riotous and relieved laughter to her grave - now, maybe, without overwhelming guilt.

"Yes," Tasha's lips twitch and form into a bashful smile. His hand gets a quick squeeze. "I think it is. What did you want to find out about?" She's not sure if she's hoping for something mundane or something impossible.

[humandroid]

Objectively, learning more on the matter intrigues him. Human behavior- inhuman in moral nature or not- is what he seeks to understand. The species has a broad history of violence. To exclude it, as others have attempted in the past due to his tendency to emulate human behaviors, wouldn't provide a full picture.

However, past incidents also indicate that to continue pursuing the subject after "don't argue the point" would not be acceptable. He has found that when someone tells him he doesn't want to know something, it indicates that they would just prefer not to delve into it.

He tightens his fingers in response, however minutely.

"I wished to seek you out for traditional social recreational activity while we are both off-duty. You have not appeared to make active efforts to avoid interaction, but opportunities have admittedly been infrequent since we began our initial voyage to Farpoint Station." His neural pathways became accustomed to a certain level of sensory input as the Enterprise gathered its final crew members and got underway. His records indicate that that level of input has decreased since they encountered Q and reached Farpoint Station. "If you would prefer interaction in a group situation, I am certain Geordi would find the idea acceptable when his shift has ended."

[tasha_yar]

She listens to all he has to say. Her bearing is far more relaxed.

"Damnit," she sighs a little. "I reconsidered my last statement. You...can ask." She lets go of her breath slowly. "I trust you, but...It's painful. And," she chuckles lightly. "Are you telling me that you missed me?"

[humandroid]

"My neural pathways are accustomed to your sensory input patterns. It is safe to say they grew to anticipate further input following those patterns. When input patterns are notably interrupted--" He pauses for a couple of moments, seeks out the most fitting terminology.

"My programming continues to function around the input it anticipates. In a sense, I suppose it can be said that I have... missed you. And I feel obligated to remind you that if you revise your statement again, we will both continue serving aboard the Enterprise for the foreseeable future. I am functionally patient."

[tasha_yar]

Tasha's laughter is as light as a feather and floats from her effortlessly.

"I've missed you, too," she admits. She lets go of his hand and picks up the dropped recorder. "And," she grins "Thank goodness someone here is." Before her sense catches up to her impulses, she gives him a quick peck on the cheek.

"Your move, Commander." She looks around the holodeck, turning her whole body; likely just long enough to confuse him with her meaning. Her head is starting to think she screwed everything they just did up all over again. "Let's turn the funeral here into something more fun."

[humandroid]

Certainly long enough to confuse him. Perhaps one of the greater benefits of being regularly confused since he was activated is that he's adapted to working with it.

A new day, a new curiosity.

"'Fun' is a subjective concept," he replies, in lieu of an (potentially already worn out) explanation of his inability to have fun. In any event, an activity she finds amenable should be fine. "But I am not opposed."