Just Pretend to Be Somone Else

Dante hesitated. "She'll know it's me. I don't know if I can pull this off."

I looked at him, "No, she won't, don't be yourself. Be..." I paused for a moment, "Be how you imagine Mal, be Bail, be a character, but don't be you. I think it's a simple court dance with limited interaction. Enough to do what we need and not so complicated that you can't remember this."

His body language said skeptical. "Ok, how about I bump into her, maybe do what the Vir Vur did for a bit, will that work better for you?" It then occurred to me that the Vir Vur might have been doing the same thing we were. Hmm, I'll have to use the deactivator on both of us when we get back.

I could do a greet-n-go, now that we had an idea of what we were looking for it'd not be too hard. My back was starting to kill me. This experience was not warming me to the idea of having babies. Maybe a dog, much easier, no diapers.... Yeah, I'm thinking a dog. I looked at Dante to see which he wanted to do.

He shook his head and headed out to where she was, taking her onto the dance floor. I'll admit to a certain pang of jealous. While I don't doubt his word about nothing happening between them, right now he was dancing with her and not me. Hmph. And he did rather well, both in dancing and placing the powder. Dorme seemed distracted most of the dance, but I wasn't tall enough to see who she was watching.

"You don't know how hard it was not to throttle her," Dante said, his voice strained, his hands balling into fists at his side. I slipped my hands into his. "We can leave now if you want, we don't have to stay any longer." I squeezed his hands. "We could go back, take a warm bath, relax, not worry about anything for a little bit." I realized how hard that must have been for him to not say anything to her.

"We'll do that," he said, "but before we do…" He then bowed, held out his hand and asked me to dance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back at the hotel, I actually got my hot bath. My back was still sore and fussy, but much better now in the hot water and without the pregnancy belly.

"Hey, you," he eventually said. "You had quite a lot to say on the subject of babies tonight. How much of that was you messing with me, and how much was real?"

I thought about that for a moment. "Most of it was messing with you. You seemed like you were trying to start something, so I figured I'd give you a hard time. I still don't like the name Riani, though," I said teasingly.

"You sounded like you had our lives planned out. This is something you've been thinking about? If not, you really had me going there for a bit. You have a fine career ahead of you as a holovid actress in the unlikely event you ever choose to leave the military," he said, chuckling softly.

TBC

Read Cpt Typho's POV here