Things hadn't been going the way Lena had expected them to. She'd been so excited to be able to take part in the Starfleet/Klingon officer exchange program when she was first given the opportunity. She was only an Ensign after all, and she knew full well that opportunities like this didn't happen to Ensigns nearly fresh out of the Academy as she was. Lena had been overjoyed when she'd been first given the news. She'd been excited, and brimming with confidence, and Lena felt as if she'd been on top of the world with a bright future and career ahead of her. That didn't last long.
The moment she'd arrived on the Tagh and introduced herself, as was protocol, to Captain Mora, everything had immediately started to go wrong. There might have been a myriad of reasons for all the mistakes Lena had begun to make right from the start, but in truth, when she really sat and thought about it, it was all because of the Captain.
From the moment Lena first laid eyes on the frighteningly tall and powerfully built Klingon woman, she'd been utterly intimidated by the Captain's mere presence alone. She stood at least two to three feet taller than Lena's barely five feet in height. Her body, what little of it that was covered up by the overly revealing Klingon armor that seemed to be tailor made to highlight and draw the eye to the woman's ample chest, almost looked as if it had been chiseled and carved in stone. She looked as if she could have easily taken Lena up by the collar and hauled her off her feet with barely any effort at all.
And those eyes. There was something in the Captain's piercingly dark gaze that Lena couldn't quite place. It was almost predatory in nature. The young ensign had decided right then and there that she was going to do her level best to limit her contact with the Captain as much as possible. The woman was terrifying, and she definitely didn't want to do anything to get on her bad side. It probably wouldn't go well for her. She got out of the Captain's chambers as quickly as she could, hoping beyond hope that the Klingon woman didn't notice how wholly intimidated she was.
Since then, it seemed as if every interaction she'd had with the Klingon crew had been nothing less than disastrous. She had no idea how she hadn't been lifted up and flung across the bulkhead several times in just the first day alone. Everything she said, everything she did just seemed to make the Klingons growl and glare at her causing Lena to get flustered and and forget nearly everything she'd learned at the Academy.
She'd started making such easily avoidable, and frankly stupid mistakes, right off the bat. She'd shorted out a pair of power relays by accidentally touching the wrong wires together in Engineering. An incident she found herself bitterly blaming on the fact that the chief engineer had been standing over her berating and snarling at her the entire time she was trying to work. When the resulting short to the system had flung her back nearly five feet against the wall, the Klingon hadn't even waited until the daze had worn off before he'd grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and tossed her bodily out of the compartment.
After that, she'd tried helping the Science officer calibrate the ships sensors, it was her specialty after all, and ended up inadvertently scrambling the sensor pod and forcing the Science officer to spend several hours putting everything back into place and fixing everything again. The Klingon's reaction was simply terrifying, and she let Lena know in no uncertain terms what she was going to do to her should she ever come near the science station again. It wasn't a pleasant thought, as the Klingon had been far more descriptive than Lena really needed to hear.
It all had come to a head on the third day in the mess hall where a pair of Klingon's had rudely shoved her aside and out of their way causing her to squeak and flail about desperately trying to maintain her balance. Another task in which she'd failed at. In fact, all she'd managed to do was violently stumble around trying not to lose her footing, which she mostly managed, right up until she'd collided into a collection of barrels of Blood-wine precariously stacked on top of each other in a way that was just asking for them to be tipped over. She'd barely managed to make it out of the mess hall in one piece after that.
She'd fled to the meager quarters she'd been assigned to on the ship, little more than a closet in her opinion, and hid herself away hoping that the whole of the day would simply pass her by. It was not to be unfortunately.
Lena hadn't been hiding in her quarters for more than a few minutes when the door slid open with a screech, and a pair of burly Klingon warriors had roughly snatched her up and dragged her by the arms throughout the ship. She'd tried to fight back at first, that was what you were supposed to do with Klingons after all wasn't it, but she was to small, and they were far to big for her to have any effect whatsoever. All she could do was bite her lip and whimper in abject terror the whole of the trip.
Without so much as a word, the two Klingons had unceremoniously thrown her through the doorway leading to the Captain's chambers where she'd crashed down hard on the floor in front of the Captain's desk with a pain-filled whimpering moan. It took her a few moment's to collect herself and crawl unsteadily up to her feet, only to be met with the unflinching, burning glare of the intimidating Klingon woman seated behind the desk.
Captain Mora didn't say a word, not at first, and Lena felt it was probably in her best interest to keep herself silent under the weight of the Klingon's hard, withering gaze. She knew the Captain was angry, she didn't need words to tell her that. The way Mora's hands were gripped tightly together as she crossed her arms beneath the swell of her breasts across her chest was enough that Lena was fully aware of her precarious position at the moment.
"Are you trying to destroy my ship?" Captain Mora demanded, her voice little more than a threatening growl.
"N-no, Ma'am," Lena managed to choke out. She could barely raise her voice up below a low squeaking whisper with the other woman looking at her as she was.
"Then explain to me why my warriors are demanding I throw you out the airlock and consign your disastrous sabotage to the emptiness of space," Mora snapped. "If it wasn't for the sheer incompetence of your actions since you've been aboard my ship, I'd think you were sent here as a Federation plot to weaken the Empire!"
Lena violently shook her head. She was in no way interested in the fearsome Klingon woman pursuing that line of thought any further than she already had. While she was reasonably sure that the Klingons wouldn't kill her for anything she'd done thus far, she wasn't one-hundred percent on that thought. What she was certain of though, was that there was a lot they could do to her for what had been going on that was likely to be considerably worse than death, and definitely not as quick. It was best to make an attempt at at least explaining herself, and maybe extricate herself from the position with her skin intact at the very least.
"Speak!" Mora demanded, jolting Lena out of her thoughts.
"M-ma'am," Lena began. The tone of the captain's voice had shaken her and jumbled her thoughts more than she'd cared to admit. "I'm trying my best. It's just-"
"It's just what?" Mora growled, cutting Lena off. "That you're nothing more than a frightened little girl who can't even seem to accomplish the most basic of tasks without causing disruptions all across my ship? You've set us and our mission behind by weeks, and you've only been here a few days."
Lena lowered her eyes and turned her head slightly downward. She could feel her body beginning to tremble slightly as her skin began to heat and flush with shame. It wasn't just the words that were having such an effect, though that wasn't pleasant by any means, it was more the tone of Captain Mora's voice, and the burning look in her eyes that was doing it. It was more than just being intimidating, Lena really didn't want to anger or disappoint this woman. Not just for her own safety, but because of how the very thought alone made her feel. It was an odd sensation to be sure, but Lena could feel a surge of panic welling up inside of her. She wanted to show this frightening woman what she could do, what she was capable of. She was just apparently terrible at it.
