Work Text:
It got to be too much effort, after a while.
She could have won every time, of course. Occasionally she stopped worrying about it, got into the swing of it and cleaned up. They would tease then, gently, as she scooped up her chips and grinned at them. Never mind that she could beat Data, who was a blank to her empathic senses. Never mind that Will had learned exceptionally well the Betazoid techniques for mental shielding that she had taught him for use in dangerous situations, but which worked just as well to make sure that, when she tried to read him, his mind gave away as little as his poker face. She won because she was reading their minds. Of course.
They laughed, pretending to themselves, and to her, that they didn’t mean it at all, that they were comfortable with it. She tried not to resent the implication that she needed an unfair advantage to win a simple card game.
There was no good solution, really. Closing off her mind well enough to avoid reading the surface emotions of the people near her took so much concentration that she couldn’t pay proper attention to the cards. And not closing her mind off did give her an unfair advantage, it was true. So she started cheating, but backwards. Losing on purpose. But it became exhausting trying to work out what was an appropriate number of games to win, and trying to make the pattern look natural.
She stopped going so much, after a while. They were all secretly relieved. Except that, to her, it wasn’t a secret.