[1] Ad Victoriam ➳ Star Trek (2009) ✔️

|05| Partnership

Chapter 5 x

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Two years ago...

"This is all YOUR fault James," Victoria grumbled as she sat in the stark white room, the 'detainment' room of the Academy.

It wasn't really a 'detainment' room but that was what all the Cadets called it when they were forced to sit in it. In old terms, it was probably better to call it 'detention.' But as they were all adults, or the Academy liked to believe they were (she had some SERIOUS doubts about James T. Kirk), they were too old to have detention. So they had decided to call it detainment instead. The Cadets that is. The Academy itself preferred to think of it as pre-probation, it was where the Cadets that didn't quite break a serious rule but still broke a minor one were taken.

It truly was essentially the detention of old though. They were expected to sit in the room, either actually writing lines or just...sitting there, wasting time, while another minor official of the school supervised them. Their current supervisor was a rather old man, so old he was literally sleeping sitting up in his chair at the head of the white room. The two of them, the only ones there, the only ones who typically ended up there, were sitting there bored out of their minds. The room was old, the chairs were nearly ancient and creaky and...hard. They really hurt the bottom after a while, the back as well, and a majority of the Cadets that ended up there were entirely convinced that the chairs themselves were some sort of medieval torture device meant to discourage the Cadets in question from committing more unruly behavior.

Clearly, it hadn't worked on the two of them.

"Oh yeah, how's it MY fault Victoria?" Kirk rolled his eyes at her, slouched in his chair with his arms crossed, having lost feeling in his back an hour ago.

"If you had just let Cupcake off, we wouldn't be here," she remarked.

"And if YOU had just told him to leave you alone, we wouldn't be here either."

"Oh, so now it's MY fault?"

"You're so keen to blame ME," he countered.

"Because it's YOUR fault! YOU were the one who punched him!"

"Because he was harassing YOU, if you hadn't noticed."

"Of course I noticed," she hissed at him, dropping her voice when she saw the old man shifting in his sleep, "If you had just kept out of it I would have handled it just fine."

It really had been the most ridiculous situation she'd ever been caught in detainment for, and she'd been there plenty of times. Half the time she wasn't even sure WHY she was there, half the time she wasn't sure if she was actually trying to end up there either. It was like...despite deciding to try for the Fleet, a part of her didn't want to be there even still. Like a part of her kept fighting against her placement, getting her in trouble as though in the hopes of getting her kicked out.

It never worked though.

All it really served to do was make her father even more disappointed in her.

She hated that, when he felt that way about her. But...she'd noticed that he just got that way more and more ever since she'd gotten into the Academy. She tried, she actually DID try to not get in trouble...but it just seemed to happen. But it wasn't her fault! Most of the time it was Kirk's fault. Despite how much they seemed to grate each other's nerves and how often they both got into little tiffs, they both seemed to just...end up there together. And it wasn't even that their own arguments got them into the situations where they ended up there, it was just...they tended to end up there together.