---Fixation---
As I enter the Terran section of the Gym and pass the boundary of the privacy field, I hear the booming *thud**thud**thud**thud* coming in rapid succession from around the corner.
I turn to see Victor traveling at dizzying speed, while remaining stationary, on a Human sized [treadmill], his, normally silent, footfalls echoing, chaotically, his body soaked with sweat, his face exhausted… but fixed forward with grim determination.
I advance, past an obliterated [heavybag], and he gives no indication that he has noticed me enter… I actually don’t think he has…!
Drawing up to the [treadmill], I give a singular, sharp *chit*, to catch his attention.
He does not react.
“Victor…” I say, still not getting any indication that he’s aware I’m here.
“Victor…” I say again, as he continues running forward at dizzying speed, while remaining stationary.
“VICTOR!!!” I say, causing him to start.
“Whu…*huff*… sorry…*huff*… what is it…*huff*… Cap?” he says, turning his haggard face to me while not breaking stride.
“I need to speak to you! Could you come off the [treadmill]!?” I say, raising my voice over his thundering footfalls.
Looking nonplussed, he waves to deactivate the backwards motion of the walkway beneath him and it begins decelerating.
When it’s reached a low enough speed, he hops off it and collapses into a semireclined position, on the floor.
“What…*huff*… d’you…*huff*… need to…*huff*… talk about?” he says, the pungent scent of his sweat assaulting my nostrils.
“What are you doing in here, Victor?” I ask, attempting to keep my tone neutral and accusation out of my voice.
“Err…*huff*… training?...*huff*… What does it…*huff*… look like?” he asks, bemused.
“It’s the middle of the nocturnal, Victor… Why are you training?” I say with concern.
“Well…*huff*… I’ve got the privacy…*huff*… field up…*huff*… What’s it matter what… *huff*… time it is?...*huff*… I ain’t disturbin’ no one…*huff*… am I?” he asks, slightly defensively.
“Not with your noise, Victor. Your behaviour, on the other hand, has been upsetting people…” I say, still trying to keep my voice factual, rather than accusing.
He begins to try to speak when I cut him off to say “Victor, catch your breath and dry yourself up, then sit with me… we need to speak properly.”
He shrugs and I take a seat on a nearby bench, waiting for him to be ready. It takes a few [minutes].
When he’s finished catching his breath and towelling off he comes and sits next to me, straddling the bench in order to allow himself to face me.
“So, I’ve been upsettin’ people? How?” he says, his exhausted face adorned with an expression of concern.
“Victor, do you know how many times I’ve visited Triple M in the last twelve diurnals?” I ask.
He frowns and answers “I don’t, Cap…”
“Seven times, Victor… How many times have we seen eachother in that same period?”
“Well… we saw eachother three days ago… briefly…” he answers, clearly uncomfortable.
“Yes… and do you remember anything we spoke about?” I ask, evaluating.
Reticent, he answers “Uhm… not as such… no…?”
“That’s because we didn’t speak, Victor… You blew in, made yourself up some ludicrously high protein, high calorie meal solution… picked up some lab grown meat for Fluffy and then took her here for exercise… beyond ‘hello’ we didn’t exchange a word…”
He shifts uncomfortably but does not answer.
“What’s going on Victor?… Have you declared some sort of deathworlder [vendetta] against Ms. Hunter, for breaking your ribs? For beating you in the tournament? Are you training for a rematch with her?”
A look of indignant revulsion passes over his face as he says “Captain?! NO!!! She beat me, fair ’n’ square! I’m not some precious little manchild who’d want payback for bein’ beaten in a contest I agreed to participate in!… Yeah… I’d’ve preferred my ribs not get broken but… well it’s not like she meant to! Not like it was spiteful! Thran and I are all good!”
I cock a browtuft “You’re ‘all good’, are you? How many times have you seen her since she sent you to the medroom?”
His eyes narrow in recall.
“None? Or if you’ve seen her at all, it was fleeting and you didn’t say much beyond ‘hello’? A little odd, given that you’ve spent nearly every hour you could in this room and she’s a [bodybuilder]? Are Terran [bodybuilders] in the habit of taking that long off from a visit to the gym?” his face tells me I’m right on the mark.
“She’s… probably been… workin’ out in her room…” he says, with unease.
I press the point “Why would she have been doing that, Victor?… She’s terrified that you hate her now, is why!… You haven’t taken the time to explain that you don’t have a grudge against her… and your behaviour is suggesting that you do!… She won’t listen to your mutual friends telling her that it’s not the case!… It’s… unlike you to be so socially blind, Victor… All your friends report that they’ve barely seen you outside this room, since the match, Dr Gato tells me you’ve purchased [three minute] periods of regeneration, multiple times per diurnal, Jennie tells me that the longest conversation she’s had with you, outside of this room, was when you came to ask her about the possibility of upgrading the functionality of our current stock of combat droids to make them better sparring partners, I’m told you’ve not joined the Cuddle Puddle and barely slept in Triple M, implying you’re either sleeping here… or, more likely looking, not sleeping full stop!… You’re looking after Fluffy, at least in the technical sense of feeding, cleaning and exercising… but you’re neglecting your friends. If it’s not for revenge, then why?! What’s going on?!”
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He opens and closes his mouth a few times, pain in his eyes. He looks like he wants me to interrupt to spare him the need to answer my question. I don’t oblige him.
After an age, he slumps and answers “I’m scared, Cap…”
“What are you scared of, Victor?” I respond, keeping my tone neutral and trusting. He’s trusting me… so it’s the least I owe him.
He, abortively, attempts to start several times “I… it’s… the thing… I need…”
Eventually, he stops, takes a deep breath, opens his eyes and fixes them on mine “Cap… I ain’t really had anything I needed to be scared of between about ages 16 and 29… When I were a kid, the worst I needed to worry about was fuckin’ idiots from school findin’ me on the street and kickin’ the shit outta me… Age 11, I took up Shaolin to be able to defend myself… age 16, I defended you… suddenly, I had cushy uni digs and an extremely generous study stipend, contributed partly by the government and mainly by you… I spent the next 4 years learnin’ how to survive, how to fight, all the ways to recognise danger and answer it, better ’an anyone!… When I came outta uni, with my, 67th generation, black sash, with my firearms licence, with my wilderness survival experience, with my xenobiology neutralisation trainin’… I felt fuckin’ invincible!… The next few years didn’t help… sure, every now ’n’ then there’d be a curious deathworld animal that’d get too close to the expedition and I’d need to scare it off or put it down but… for the most part… my job consisted of tellin’ people (much smarter ’an me) to spit out fuckin’ obviously poisonous berries, an’ stuff!… I was so much stronger ’an everyone around me! Sure, I usually weren’t the smartest in the room but I was always the one with the most, what I’d call, common-sense!… I ain’t never told no one this but… at 25, when I were doin’ the correspondence course to upgrade to Security Specialist… for fun (and a little for vanity) I decided to try and work out roughly how many people in the galaxy’d be a match for me in a fight… it was never meant to be serious (obviously, ‘in a fight’ is too vague to be taken serious!) just a bit of theoretics and ego strokin’… the number I came up with was 10,000… that was the ballpark, back o’ the envelope, Fermi estimation of people I thought might be a match for me… how I got there, ain’t important. The fact is, that number stuck in my head… 10,000 people I reckoned might be able to beat me… every time I felt unsure about something I’d laugh that, unless one of those 10,000 have defied the odds to show up and are hellbent on destroyin’ me, I ain’t got nothin’ to worry about… Then I had my little… meltdown, and you hired the other Triple Ms and I was like ‘Cool! Samus is nearly in the 10,000! And, in certain circumstances, Tuun is in the 10,000! Well, they’re friends so it ain’t like I need to worry about it!’… Then, we got boarded… I was the weak link… I was the one who needed to go to regen on a stretcher… everyone else did what they was supposed to! That man… he was just better ’an me!… Suddenly, it seemed like the most vain, conceited, arrogant, narcissistic thing imaginable to have ever estimated myself so high! And… since then, there’s been a few other things, like talkin’ to Tuun’s mums; Katrín’s got 125 years of HEMA and reconstructed Norse martial arts under her belt… more ’an six times my CQC experience, even if she’s only ever used it in reenactments!...”
He pauses here, to take a breath, before continuing “… When Thran broke my ribs, it made me realise… I can’t keep bein’ complacent… there’s scary stuff and scary people out there and every extra bit of strength I have, every extra bit of experience, skill, makes me better able to put myself between the scary stuff and the ones I want to keep safe!”
Alright, he’s given me a… lot to consider there!
I decide to buy myself time by asking “…and the brief regen periods, Victor? What are they for?”
“Oh… err… well, Terran’s gain muscle by workin’ out ’cause when we do stuff that strains the capacity of our current level of muscle, it tears and frays. When our body repairs itself, it effectively says ‘Well this clearly ain’t sufficient, guess we need to add a little more muscle!’. Exercisin’ naturally, you’ve gotta give yourself time to recover so there’s a limit to how fast you can make gains… usin’ regen, I can just keep goin’ and goin’ then drag myself to the medroom to recover… last two weeks I’ve gained 3kg of muscle, that’s like four months’ worth!… So long as I make sure I’ve got enough protein and calories on board, only limit is wakin’ hours in the day… and I’ve… been usin’ stims to maximise those…” he answers, guilty at that last.
“So, to summarise, Victor…” I say with a wry cock of my browtuft “…your behaviour can be described as ‘Mighty deathworlder, who believed himself invincible, discovers that he is, in fact, mildly vincible, becomes fixated on eradicating the last of his weakness and ascending, from the mortal realm, to godhead’? Truly, a worthy [supervillain] origin story(!)”
He chuckles… but the smile does not touch his tired eyes.
“The reason it’s a legal requirement to have a Terran escort on expeditions to deathworlds, Victor? What is it?” I say, echoing my words to him the night he broke his arm from drunkenness.
He looks up in recall “Not strength… not ferocity… self-preservation? Nose for danger?”
I give a Terran smile paired with a nod of agreement “Just so, dear boy… However, on this occasion, your self-preservation is telling you that you aren’t safe because things exist that might harm you… Victor, without becoming a deity… there will always be things that could harm you… you also can’t be everywhere at once… so, even after you attained your unattainable invincibility, you wouldn’t be able to guarantee always being next to everyone you want to protect, every time they need protecting…” I pause to collect my thoughts, before continuing “Victor, it seems to me that you’re more likely to lose your new friendships by neglecting them in pursuit of the strength to protect them… than you are by failing to protect them… Also, you’re clearly suffering from sleep deprivation. How fit do you think you’d be to fight off pirates in your current state?”
Tears well up in his eyes as he looks down in shame “You’re right…*sniff*… Cap… I was bein’ stupid!…”
I place my wingclaws on the stonehard flesh of his forearm and refute “No, Victor… Not stupid! You are a deathworlder and, to be frank, having evolved on one of the single most hellish planets ever studied, it’s a [fucking] miracle that Humans aren’t gibbering nervous wrecks ALL the time!… What this is, is you having a moment of realisation, regarding the fragility of life, and wanting to do something about it! Not stupid!… Granted, what you chose to do was somewhat stupid… and counterproductive… but I can understand why you reacted this way… It’s probably, in large part, my fault for taking [nine years] to recognise that you needed friends! Now you have friends, it’s natural that you’d be scared to lose them!…”
He smiles at me, through his tears. I stand and extend my wings to wrap them around his shoulders.
Reaching to gently pat my back, as I hug him, he says “Cap…?”
“Yes, Victor?”
“I think I need a therapist… or somethin’…”
“I’ll talk to Miyazaki about that tomorrow, I’m sure she will be able to procure someone qualified to meet us on one of the next few planets before we leave Terran Space… what you need right now, however, is sleep, Victor!… Captain’s orders; go to Triple M, sleep, either in the Cuddle Puddle or in your and Tuun’s room, tomorrow, talk to Thran, talk to everyone so they aren’t worrying, explain as much as you’re comfortable with… then come and visit Tcakak, when you’re ready, she’s missed you!”
He nods over my wing and then makes to get up, causing me to release him from the hug.
We leave the Terran section together and, as we pass through the privacy field, I say “Twila…?”
“Yes, Captain?” comes her voice, over the PA.
“As of this moment, onboard regen is for medical use only, time is no longer available for purchase.”
“I’ll make it so, Captain. Anything else?” she answers, cheerfully.
“Yes… Victor Taylor is limited to [2.5 hours] in the gym, per diurnal… if he attempts to exceed that…” I stop, to think a moment “…pipe in Baby Shark Dance, on repeat, at 400% standard volume, until he leaves…” I smile at him.
“Ah… Cap… low blow(!)” he laughs.