***I struggled with the category for this, but finally decided that if I kept it down to a little shy fumbling, it might fly. I really didn't want one chapter of a story in a different category - though if I feel like it later, I still might put something together for Sam and Siobhan, I dunno. If you're bothered by it, just skip ahead, ok?
0_o
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Siobhan looked out through the expanse of glass in the converted old sun-room at the snowy countryside all around her as she stood with her arm around Sam and feeling the weight of the arm which now rested on her shoulders. She considered the past thirty-six hours and thought of it all as something of a minor miracle for the way that it had happened.
She'd gotten up in her little rented cottage in Yorkshire, taken a quick shower -- as though there were any other kind to take there, gotten dressed to travel, and scooped up the two suitcases and one carry-on bag which now amounted to her entire life as she made ready to leave her internship and life experiment behind her to go home.
That internship had been a resounding success, which she supposed that she could take away as a victory, but the experiment had been a dismal failure in the way that it pointed to the cause of the other reason that she'd gone there in the first place. Two years, she thought, two years in another place doing the things that she'd set out to do, but there was the other thing.
Other than the people which her work brought her into daily contact with, she'd met no one, pretty much, and it indicated that perhaps it hadn't been the experiment of trying to break out of the shell that she had been born into and grown up in so much as it pointed to the fact that it was her who was the failure. She'd tried and tried, but Siobhan had never mastered the ability to meet people and make friends to any degree, and she lived a very lonely existence for it.
Mastered? Hell, she'd never even been able to learn the basics, other than being polite and trying to look friendly. Two years there and she was still alone. Two years of living in the English countryside with excursions to London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Stockholm, Cologne, and yes, even to Paris once.
She'd tried to look on the bright side and thought to the few times when she'd actually gotten laid while she was there, but those were only three liaisons and not the relationships which she found herself pining to have even once in her life. Those had amounted to little more than pick-ups that she'd allowed and quick fucks, and not one of them had been even a little enjoyable unless you were the man.
Her body did appeal to the men who had bedded her, but she already knew that they wanted only that from her -- not that they were that great themselves. She was more than a little certain that with a dark room, a latex glove with lube smeared over it and a sound track of her pretending to moan playing as a loop, it would suffice for them while she'd get nothing more than deeper melancholy and darkening despair.
She remembered the time that she'd almost broken down and cried in her misery one afternoon while working at the clinic where she was interning at about the halfway point. A rather bellicose old landowner had brought in his foul-tempered looking English Mastiff, saying that he didn't imagine that anyone there would be able to get the beast's toenails clipped properly in any sort of short order, so he'd be back to pick up the monster later that afternoon.
"You can sedate him if you must," he'd said in the speech of the locals, "I'd rather that it weren't necessary, but 'e won't take kindly to the treatment -- 'e never has -- so good luck to yer, Miss."
Siobhan gave it a go and she did manage to get the nails clipped to an acceptable length, but in the course of that, she learned that Ajax was a horny thing, and all of the wrestling which was required -- and that was what it had been, if not nearly mortal combat at moments - gave him enough of a chance for his nose to determine that she was a female.
Some lamp lit dimly in his tiny brain and then it became more of a mating attempt on his part.
After that, he didn't give all that much of a damn about worrying over his nails; he was bent on shoving that drooling snout into her crotch and at one point, it looked as though he was trying to manage a lot more of a carnal indiscretion with her, but her fist driven into the top of his stone-hard head ( since nothing else was working) settled him back to looking murderous and he allowed his nails to be clipped at last. The whole thing had been supremely embarrassing to Siobhan in light of the fact that it had taken her and a male intern to get it done.
Well, not really. The male intern in question had been scared shitless of Ajax.
Harold was a thin and nervous-looking young man who'd grown up in the shadow of his mother's affluence and as men go, to Siobhan's mind at least, he lacked many of the things that set them apart from people of her gender, having little to no upper body strength or strength of any kind -- inside him or out.
He seemed to prefer the care and upkeep of canaries to anything larger than a Shi tsu and she wondered what he was doing there interning at a practice whose business was an even mix of semi-urban and agricultural. He spent most of his time during any shift with her flipping his hair out of his eyes and pouting over something.
As far as helping her, he'd been less than useless, being quite obviously in fear of a large, though muzzled canine and he did little more than watch and squirm uncomfortably when Siobhan had gotten fairly well pinned in a corner while old Ajax tried to mount her. She'd realized then that Harold didn't have a clue about handling large animals and before it went farther than her having to look at that pink thing bobbing the air before her and dragging over her skirt, she'd acted.
It had only happened because Harold was afraid and she'd mistakenly assumed that he was actually trying to hold the animal when really, it was all that he could do to lay his hands on the beast and keep them there in light and trembling contact.
"You were supposed to restrain him," she'd said, seething as she worked to cut the toenails, and it looked as though even the beast didn't have the stones to do more than lie there compliant in the face of her wrath by then. "When exactly were you going to do a thing to help me?"
One look at his face and she knew that he'd never had to do anything such as this. Being a girl off a farm, she'd learned long ago that you don't show a bullish animal like Ajax any fear. "You handle them with friendliness and firm kindness, most of all with certainty," she'd hissed angrily at Harold, "You don't stand there shaking on the other side of the room with a stiff little willy while he tries to rape me."
He'd looked at her with no answer whatsoever, which irritated Siobhan even more, so she'd tossed the conversational knife, being angry enough for it by then.
"Or were you waiting for a chance at seconds, Harold?" she'd snarled quietly in her anger, "Which one of us did you fancy, me or Ajax? My money's on him."
Harold's pouting mouth had fallen open then and as he turned beet red, he left hurriedly while she finished the job alone. Siobhan had to endure a sit-down with their superior and Harold for it afterward, since Harold had lodged a complaint.
