Work Text:
Want to take a walk?
Nerys had laid a hand on his back as they made their way down the hall, and the sensation of her hand flared bright in the midst of his grief, like a gout of flame in a cold, wet cave.
It felt different than it would have when he had been humanoid. Not that he had been touched often in that form—more often than he had been as a Changeling, but that was saying so very little. Mostly by Dr. Bashir and the other medical staff, fleeting and impersonal even when there was not the barrier of gloves. The minimum necessary for moving him from place to place, for taking whatever obscure measurements they were insisting on that day: heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure. It had all been oddly like being back in Dr. Mora’s lab, even as it was so different, humanoid senses duller in some places and sharper than others, sensations intrusive and inescapable.
It was both more and less, now.
If Nerys had laid a hand on his back when he was trapped in that form, he would have felt only the weight of it, or if he had been lucky, a touch of its heat. Even that little would have set off a riot of sensation and emotion, his heart knocking against his ribs like a persistent security officer, his blood rushing to his face like a criminal eager to confess. But the cloth of his uniform would have kept him from feeling the swirls of her fingerprints, the pulse of her veins.
Now…
Her thumb absently stroked a circle on his back, his back that was once more not cloth but purely him, and he felt her touch pass through him like a ripple, an echo reverberating through each cell in his body. A feeling like the gong that sometimes called Bajorans to prayer, and at the same time like a bomb going off in each manufactured nerve ending. He was surprised he did not stagger at it, this joy like a knife, this too-close-not-close-enough.
He could choose to move the nerve endings from his back, feel this with less intensity.
But this pain was a homecoming too.
They had been silent since he had accepted Nerys’ invitation. She had always been good about giving him silence. Their steps echoed, her stride a little shorter than his until he adjusted to compensate, to keep her hand from slipping away. But her pace picked up again as they reached the habitat ring. A side glance revealed that her jaw had tightened, her brow furrowed.
Odo picked at the mystery until a laugh rang out of an open doorway—Ensign Taylor, Odo recognized that slight trill at the end of the giggle—and Nerys flinched.
Ah.
So quick, he might not have seen it when he was humanoid. But now that he was once more so attuned to the rapid change of the forms around him, he coudn’t not see it.
She had thought for a second that it was the O’Briens’ party, even though they were on the other side of the habitat ring. And that had made her want to hide.
I know the feeling, Odo wanted to say. Felt, in the place in his chest where a heart used to be, a kind of throbbing pull, like a magnet wanting to force the words out of his mouth. An alien feeling, and yet—perhaps he could act on it. Perhaps he could say—
“I only just heard,” Kira said abruptly. She blinked, rapid-fire. Her voice did not quite crack. “About the infant Changel—about your baby.”
Your baby, she said, and Odo’s heart tried to reform in his chest, like that lost organ yanking at the core of him, beating itself into bloody existence one wrenching throb at a time.
She was the only one who had said it in so many words. Odo thought he might have died if anyone else had said it. It might have crumbled him to ash.
“Doctor Bashir didn’t want any additional stress,” she was saying, her eyes so wide as she glanced to the side at him. “I almost punched him when he said that, but the delivery—"
“I understand,” Odo managed, and was relieved that it came out so normally—gruff, but then, he was a gruff man.
He did understand. He remembered the Occupation all too well, how hard it was for Bajoran women to give birth in the traditional way. Most of them had bowed to the circumstances, had the camp doctors perform caesarians with what painkillers could be begged or stolen, but there were some that had stubbornly clung to the old ways, the scratching sound of the rattle not quite muffled by a tent for days on end as they tried to relax during a genocide.
In those younger, arrogant days he had judged them for what seemed an illogical choice, courting death when it already hounded their every footstep. Most of them would have grown up under the Occupation as well, would have been birthed through those same coldly scientific methods they then scorned. It had seemed nonsensical to him that they would risk not only their own lives, but their children’s, in this way.
But now…
Now he thought of bright lab lights and the controls for the electrostatic charge, and feelings that were too bright and sharp and aching to be put into words. And he thought that perhaps those women were braver than he was. He had capitulated, in the end, to Dr. Mora’s methods, because he knew they worked, and he did not yet know that it would all be futile. If he had known…
How painful, to know that your child must go through what you have through. How much he would have liked to have things go another way.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Nerys asked. Her palm lifted away for half a second, just the tips of her fingers remaining in contact with him, as if to say that she would not hold him in place if he wanted to flee.
He did want to talk about it, Odo found to his surprise. It was an extension, in a way, of that feeling he had had in his office, ordering the champagne to share with Dr. Mora, and later in the bar with Quark—my child, my child, let me tell you of my wonderful and perfect child! And now that child was gone, but the feeling remained. He wanted to tell her of the baby Changeling’s every accomplishment, how fast they had learned, how bravely they had reached out. He wanted Nerys to come to know them as he had.
But the words refused to come, stuck somewhere inside him, as if they had gotten lost in the melting and melding of his internal organs back into the unstable flux of who he was. He grasped for them, but there was only himself, protean and untranslatable as he had always been to the ones who had wanted to know him most.
“Did you play springball when you were a child?” he asked instead.
Nery’s brow knit further at the non sequitur, but she didnn’t challenge it. “Of course,” she said. “When we had a ball, anyway. Although—” a laugh here, light and real, and Odo marveled at how she could laugh with such fondness remembering such a dark time—“I recall a time or two my brothers and I tried to make a rock work.”
“I imagined teaching them springball,” Odo said. “I—” He cleared his throat, an old habit made alien by recent estrangement. How strange it felt to do it this way, not the way he had to relearn to do it with his humanoid body. “I don’t know why. Never played. Maybe a memory—or a book, even. Yes, it could have been a book.” Dr. Mora had given him books, back when he was first learning to read, such a strange mix of books. He had only later learned who they had been confiscated from, what had likely happened to them. “Pictures of—of happy Bajoran families.”
It was not all he wanted to say. But Nerys’ hand moved in warm, gentle circles on his back, as if she heard the words he did not say all the same.
#
They moved past the habitat ring now, onto the Promenade. Nerys kept her hand on Odo’s back; was amazed that he had let her hand rest there this long, that he hadn’t long since twitched away, grumbling some excuse. He had never been comfortable with touch, and she couldn’t blame him, even with not knowing more than the few hints he’d let slip over the years: the scientists’ ceaseless examinations, the threats disguised as jokes if he did not comply, they’ll put you in a zoo, Odo!
Sometime in the last few years she had become an exception, and she felt that honor like a medal on her chest. Aware of the weight of it, and also, how easily the ribbon that held it there could fray or snap with too much pressure.
She promised herself not to let her disappointment show when he inevitably pulled away. He would move away soon, she was certain. Beyond the understandable skittishness he had around contact, there were the defense mechanisms he had built up to hide it, stances and mannerisms that he would no more leave his quarters without than his semblance of a uniform. He had a certain image to keep up. It was his armor, and she would not take it from him.
But he didn’t pull away even as they turned along the Promenade. Perhaps because it was the night shift? The lights were low, the walkways sparsely populated, a few shopkeepers closing their storefronts, a few drunks stumbling home as the dabo wheel wound its clicking way to a muted chorus of disappointed grumbles from Quark’s.
Nerys knew that the reason the Promenade was so deserted was because most people on the station were asleep. She knew it was not because everyone else was at the O’Briens’ party. But that had been what it felt like, when she and Edon had made their appearance: so many faces, smiles on smiles on smiles until her face hurt from having to smile back, and everyone talking so loud that she couldn’t keep track of the conversations, kept losing the thread, distracted by that unexpected ache in her empty, empty arms every time she saw the boy that she had given birth to in his parents’ embrace.
She had been so grateful that Edon had been there, and more grateful still that he’d had to leave, because she couldn’t think of any other excuse that the O’Briens would have accepted for her own departure from the celebration, and she didn’t know how much she could stand of their joy.
It would have been nice, to have had longer with Edon. But perhaps it had been for the best—she’d already quarreled with him once, and everything was still so close to the surface. Better to wait until next month, when his relief that this was all over wouldn’t sting so much, when she’d be able to enjoy him enjoying her company without that persistent aching thought, you don’t understand.
“I heard—” Odo began, cutting himself off as if he regretted breaking the silence before forging on. “I heard the O’Briens are naming the child after you.”
“Kirayoshi, yes,” Nerys said. There was a pang there, but also—“Part of me never thought…there were so many times in the Resistance when I almost died. My brothers died long before then. Part of me never—and now, to know that whatever happens to me…”
Her throat closed up and she couldn’t quite finish.
“A part of you will go on,” Odo said simply. “A part of your family will go on.”
“Yes,” she said, shooting him a grateful smile. “Exactly.”
And that was when he moved away from her hand, a little twitch as he shied away, hiding it under a harrumph. “You humanoids,” he said gruffly. “It all comes down to family with you.”
As if he did not know exactly what it meant to have lost his entire family. Oh, Odo.
And also… ‘unidentified sample.’ ‘Nothing.’ He knew exactly the importance of names, too.
“‘You humanoids,’” she mimicked back to him with a smile, because she had missed that, the way he always said it. “I think we all thought we might never hear that again. How does it feel?”
In the next second, she could kick herself. How did she think it felt? He had only regained his form because he had lost his child.
But Odo seemed to take no offense, taking her question seriously. He raised his hand before his eyes, turning it at the wrist, bending his fingers as if playing that old Earth instrument that Molly had been learning—what was that called, a piano?
“Disorienting,” he said. His brow creased in thought. “I understand the shapes better than I ever did before. But I keep being surprised I have to make them—the bones and the muscle and sinew. That they aren’t just…there. And then…”
His fingers melted and blurred, molten copper and gold dancing in the air at the end of his arm. Nerys’ heart squeezed tight at the intimacy of it, an openness she couldn’t ever remember him showing before. For all their friendship, there had always been certain barriers that not even she had been allowed across. He had shifted in front of her before, of course, but for work—pursuing a criminal as a Tarkalian hawk, allowing a blade to pass through a sudden hole in his torso. Never just to show her something about himself
“And then it’s like coming home,” he said, still watching his own hand. “To an empty house…but still home.”
#
Somehow they had completed a second loop of the Promenade without Nerys deciding to take her leave of him. Oh, he had missed this. Missed her. It used to hurt too much, being around her—that bright smile, those brilliant eyes, that laugh that made him want to say anything that might make her laugh again. The pain was still there, dulled into an ache, but oh, she was still Nerys, and he has missed her. He should have tried to talk with her before now.
She hadn’t reached out to him again since he withdrew, but she was looking at him with those wide brown eyes. At him, not just his shifting hand. She had always seen him, even back at the very beginning, when he didn’t want her to.
“I can’t feel—the child,” he confessed. Let his hand shift back to fingers, hoping as he did that his body would make a liar of him, but it was only the old familiar feeling, the tension of taking a form, the reward in its complexity. “I hoped—if it was a gift, a thing it did on purpose, I might feel them with me. But I am just…myself.”
Alone, he didn’t say. It would be ungrateful.
“Prophets, I’m sorry,” Nerys said. Her hands twitched; she wanted to reach out, but did not. Because he pulled away earlier?
“Nothing you’ve done,” he said, trying to cover up how much it meant, those three words.
Nerys huffed, sounding so like him for a second that he had to suppress the twitch of his lips. “I know that! It’s not only an apology, you know. It means, I feel sorrow.”
“No reason you should,” Odo said stubbornly. He could feel a knot feeling struggling to untie inside him, and he tried to pull it tight to keep from unspooling. “You didn’t know—"
“The hell I shouldn’t,” Nerys snapped. “My friend is hurt, and I will feel however I damn well please about it!”
Nerys’ indignation burned bright, her anger making her a sun. Impossible not to revolve around her. If he had still had a heart—he had formed a skeletal and muscular system to assist him in walking, but a circulatory system had seemed needlessly complicated at the time—it would be racing.
Odo inclined his head, a surrender he hoped did not betray all his secrets. “I just meant,” he said gruffly, “you have your own loss. Kirayoshi is—"
“Still alive,” Kira said, a stubborn jut to her jaw. It was so painfully her-- so ready to fight anyone, even her own grief— that a dangerous softness swamped him.
“I didn’t realize it was a competition,” he said archly. “Do I ask Dr. Bashir for a medal?”
She froze, and for a second he thought he had overstepped, had misjudged the tone—too cold, too cynical. But then she laughed, ragged and guilty but real, relieved. An abashed smile bloomed, smothering the scowl.
“Oh, Odo,” she said, and it was fond beyond belief, fonder than he had any right to. “I can always count on you to tell it like it is.”
He inclined his head, the closest gesture he’d ever found to gracefully accepting a compliment.
Nery’s eyes were still dancing, bright as stars. “Remember when we met?”
Odo raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”
This would be a miracle too, if he were the kind of man who believed in miracles: how easily she could say that now, how easily he could respond. Once this was the deepest wound in their friendship, one that he had thought they might not recover from. Now it was the faintest scar.
“I saw how careful you were with children,” Nerys said. “The ones who used to hang back behind the fence. The Cardassians ignored them most of the time, unless they were bored—” she grimaced, repressing a shudder; Odo well knew the kinds of things Cardassian soldiers did when bored—“but you looked at them, without being obvious. I saw how careful you were around them, not moving too quickly to scare them, not drawing attention to how they were staring.”
“Self-preservation,” Odo muttered in protest, looking down. His feet, in counterfeit boots, scuffed along the Promenade floor. “I had an investigation to run. Wouldn’t have done me any good if I’d frightened them. Caused a lot of attention when I was trying to be discreet.”
“Of course, Constable,” Nerys said, with the look she always got when she was holding back a grin but thought it was funnier to pretend to agree.
“I never really…thought of children,” Odo tried to explain. He didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, to paint him with virtues he had not earned. “I was the only one of my kind. It didn’t seem worthy of thought.” Or of the pain that would have attended it. A new thought occurred to him; he tried to word it delicately, all too aware that he had the conversational graces of a sledgehammer. “But surely you—well, you humanoids. Obsessed with procreation. Maybe not during the Occupation, but after— Surely you thought—"
Oh, well done, Odo. About as charming as a rockslide.
But Nerys had been his friend for years now, knew the sentiments—well, some of the sentiments—behind the gruff words he deployed like soldiers manning a barricade. She took no offense, just frowned thoughtfully, her gaze going to the long windows, the field of stars where the wormhole, her temple of the Prophets, lurked in darkness.
“I did think of it,” she admitted, chewing her lip. “And then I thought—” Her eyes, reflected in the dark of the windows, glistened. “I saw so much violence in the Occupation, Odo. Not just saw. The things I did—” she hugged one arm to her side, the gesture oddly childlike in contrast to her words. “That doesn’t just disappear, no matter how you tamp it down. You know what my temper is like, if I ever turned that against my own child—”
“Nonsense,” Odo said gruffly. The anguish in her voice cut him like a knife; he felt his own voice go harsher to compensate. Become granite, become untouchable. “I’ve seen your temper in action plenty of times. If you haven’t murdered any members of the provisional government yet, you’re not going to harm a child. The idea. Hmmph!”
“Oh, Odo!” Nerys smilds at him, so wide, so sincere, seeing right through him. It made him feel like he was falling. It made him feel that he never wanted to land.
#
She had forgotten just how easy it was, being with Odo. Even now that they had lapsed into silence again, it didn’t feel awkward. She didn’t feel the need to glance to the side to check his face for boredom, or read anything into the rhythm of his breaths—he didn’t even breathe.
They just walked, and the station felt a little more like home again.
Nerys felt a little guilty, but a small part of her was almost relieved that Edon had left. She loved him so much, but he didn’t understand. What this experience had been for her, what it had meant. He wanted everything to go back to normal, and she loved him, and if he had stayed she would have felt as if she needed to perform being back to normal for him—smiling and conversation and embraces and laughter, dates at the Klingon restaurant and planned trips back to Bajor—all the while feeling that she might never be ‘back to normal’ again.
It was all right that Edon didn’t understand, truly. How could Nerys expect him to, when she barely did herself? And he would try, she knew, if she asked it of him; he would sincerely try to listen and understand. But it would be so many conversations, so many stops and false starts and dead ends, and the very thought tired her to the bone, hollowed her out like a piece of pottery that could crack at any moment.
So it had been a relief to say goodbye to him at that shuttle. A greater relief still to see Odo standing there when he was gone.
Because Odo understood.
Odo always understood.
By unspoken agreement, their feet made the turn to the one of the spiral stairwells, descending to the lower level of the Promenade. They passed the Replimat, the shuttered windows of the new Bolian place, the jumja vendor’s cart stripped of its wares. The Promenade was so quiet at night, like a canvas waiting to be sketched on. Nerys had never had any promise as an artist, but now she could not help but sketch in the images in her mind’s eye: walking here hand-in-hand with a toddler Kirayoshi, his plump little legs pumping to keep up; Molly holding her other hand too, still a little jealous of losing her place as the baby. Both of them chattering away on different topics that she does her best to pay attention to but gets hopeless muddled between, accidentally answering Kirayoshi’s question about hara cats with a response to Molly’s nattering about fairy tales. You’re being so silly, Aunt Nerys! She’ll laugh at herself along with them, and buy them both jumja sticks, and then have to chase after them when the sugar hits their system. Scold them and hug them and deliver them home, sleepy and cranky, to their parents.
The thought wasn’t as painful as it had just an hour ago. Which wasn’t to say that it wasn’t painful.
But in the grand scheme of things, she had survived much worse. She would survive this too.
Was a part of her disappointed in that? Had she hoped that this might be a profounder loss, something to crack her open, to say yes the rivers of blood on your hands are never-ending, but here is a tenderness inside you that can be redemption, here is the part of you that is not violence and you will know that forever by the way it has been wounded?
Maybe a part of her did think that. She remembered Kai Opaka, and wondered what the older woman what she would say to such a confession.
Probably that nothing would ever be so simple.
Nerys sighed, and Odo seemed to take that as punctuation, turning to her with a little incline of his head. “Goodnight, Major.”
She thought about correcting him, asking for another lap. They would not have to say another word; they could simply be.
But the stronger part of her, the one that knew she deserved no miracles and had been granted a small one tonight already, told her not to push for more. She mirrored him. “Good night, Constable. It was…it was a good talk.”
And you can call me Nerys again, she almost added. Perhaps all he had needed, all this time, was an invitation. He had always been so conscious, in that way of outsiders, of propriety and protocol. Perhaps he had only still been so formal with her because he was waiting to be told it was all right not to be.
Perhaps he only needed the invitation, to be told that it was all right.
But she saw how upright he was holding himself. His spine even more stiff than usual, and maybe it was just that for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have a spine, was trying to remember how to stand upright—but she suspected it was the child. She knew that stiffness, that reserve, ‘Major’ instead of ‘Nerys’—it was his armor.
She would never take that away from him.
“Maybe we could…do this again sometime?” she asked instead. Wondered for a moment at the nervous flutter in her stomach when she did.
He gave another nod. “You know where to find me.”
#
Odo didn’t go back to his quarters right away.
They’ll look different, through these new old eyes. Everything will look different because he was different. But around him, everything will still be the same.
He reached inside himself with his awareness, tried to feel again if the child was there, some echo or trace.
He took the stairs back to the upper level; he could have flown, but the deliberate step of one foot in front of the other suited his mood. He stared out at the stars, at his reflection over them. So different inside, but still the same face. Would the child have imitated it, if it had lived, had grown? The child would have eventually surpassed him, but perhaps even if it did so, it might keep the face. Not out of inertia and lack of skill, but out of…love.
How wonderful it would be to cry. Really cry. He made a tear and watched it track down his face, but it was not the same. It was a script he learned to communicate emotions the way humanoids did. If he had been brought up by his own people…
But no. He would be someone else then. He would have different losses. He wouldn’t have Nerys.
Despite all the barriers between them, the layers of translation he’d had to learn to communicate, sometimes Nerys understood. And even when she didn’t, she wanted to.
Her friendship was the most precious thing he had ever had.
He did not count the child as something he had had. He never really had them. They were gone even before he knew it.
He reached for them again with his awareness. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He had become his name.
Being alone was nothing new. He’d survived this before. He would survive it again, this familiar pain.
And he would not be completely alone. Nerys will be there. He’ll have his friend back. His friend.
That pain was familiar too.
I love you, he thought, to her, to the child, to his people, even though he should not include them. Even Dr. Mora. This was the worst thing about love, he found; it never ended.
He stared out into the night, and very carefully did not reach with his awareness for the child, and told himself he was not waiting to hear the words back.