NOTE: This story takes place about a month after “Children of Time.” 😀
Eight thousand? Just dead, wiped out of existence. An entire civilization of two hundred years erased from the pages of history. How dare he do this to her! How dare he save her life, sacrifice eight thousand so she could live her piddly, depressing little life! How dare he! When she saw him, he was surely going to hear it . . .
But it wasn’t Odo’s fault, Nerys. At least, not this Odo. And you can’t rightly yell at the other one. He’s . . . Kira stared blankly at the ceremonial Bajoran mediation circle as it gleamed over the candle light. The dull sensation of guilt and anger had plagued her for some time now, almost a month after they had left Gaia. She had tried and tried each night to reconcile herself to the fact that they were all gone, but, try as she might, nothing seemed to work.
Finally she had the reason why. To be certain the people of Gaia had made a great impression on her, infecting her with the spirit of a civilization that reminded her of Bajor, a peaceful agrarian society. But, eventually, she had come to realize that their deaths were not on her hands. They were on the hands of the one person she had come to think of as immortal.
Odo. Now, he was dead because of her. It made little difference that Odo was also very much alive in the here and now; he was not the same. The Odo she had met on Gaia had been so much different, so much more human. She had found herself drawn closer to him, in a way she never had been with Shakaar or even Bareil. This was her friend, only he loved her.
It had been a shock at first. Odo in love with her? It was impossible. And yet, as she had spent time with him, she had come to accept it as the truth. Perhaps it had been a little too easy to accept. They had been so comfortable together; there were no pretenses, no uneasy moments after the initial confusion in her head had cleared. He already knew her so well and he had been so tender, so gentle. So many times she had been treated just as her reputation stated her: a tough former member of the Shakaar Resistance who had survived just about everything thrown at her. It seemed to be an invitation for roughly intense relationships.
Odo had treated her different. He had been as hesitant and adoring as a little boy, gazing at her virtually every moment they spent together. Every time he had touched her it had been a soft brush as if she would break right before his eyes, shatter a dream-induced vision.
But he had been the one to shatter. He was nothing more than a dream to her now. She still couldn’t believe it. Had it been Odo, the man always on the side of justice and order, that had killed eight thousand people including himself? Had he been driven crazy after two hundred years?
No, not driven crazy for she had seen the look on Odo’s face on the Defiant after Gaia’s population was no more. He understood his alternate’s motives, would have followed them in a heartbeat. Could he be capable of such love, that would drive him past all his morals and things he swore by? Could she possibly mean more to him than his job, his justice, his order?
(-|-)
He looked over every inch of his form, fingers, knuckles, feet, toes, all simple things but not anymore, not since . . .
He had come so close to losing her forever, before he could tell her all the things he wanted to, all the things he agonized over every night, all the things he came so close to telling her every day.
And he had almost lost that chance.
He could kick himself! What was he doing now, pacing in his quarters? Oh, yes, that was taking a great advantage over the chance he had been given. He hadn’t even been able to tell her himself! To be sure their friendship had been strained; eight thousand lives was bound to do that, but couldn’t she understand? He would do the same thing now, if it meant that she would live . . . that was the only thing important to him. Not his job, not order, not justice – just her. But could she understand that? Could he himself understand that?
The door chime sounded.
“Who is it?”
“Kira,” came the somewhat faint reply.
“Come in.” He tried to keep the eagerness from his voice. She had hardly spoken two words to him outside of official duty. A cup of raktajino, extra hot, two measures of kava, had grown cold on his desk four Tuesdays in a row, and when they had talked, their conversations had been curt and very, very professional. For her to be here now . . . it probably meant she had some questions for him.
The doors slid shut soundly behind Kira once she stood firmly inside the room. She had come on pure impulse, not stopping to think about what she would do once she got there. All she knew was that she had to see him, to try and understand . . .
“Hello, Odo.” The name sounded strangely foreign on her lips. “Do you have some time to, ah, to talk?”
“Of course, Major.” Odo nodded and indicated for her to take a seat.
Kira walked towards the window, a seeming eye on the universe. She took up residence in the small curved sill. “I don’t know what to think anymore, Odo.”
Odo crossed to the window as well, leaning lightly against the opposite edge of the window. He admired Kira as she sat, spotlighted by the faint yet stark light gleaming through the window. “I don’t know what to tell you, Major.”
“Well, you can start by not calling me by rank,” she said brusquely. Kira sighed. “I’m sorry, Odo. I’ve just been a little high-strung lately. All this hasn’t been exactly easy to handle.”
“I can imagine.” The words hung in the air, a silent acknowledgment of guilt. “If it helps, this hasn’t been easy for me either.” His eyes drifted past the stars, past the blackness.
Kira regarded the man before her. This was still the Odo she had always known, no matter what had happened. And yet, she was beginning to wonder if she knew as much about him as she had once thought. What was lying behind that cool collected demeanor of his? Was there a side of himself he had never shown to anyone?
“Odo, was what the other Odo said true?”
“About loving you?” he asked in an off-handed manner. Kira nodded. Odo took a deep breath. “Nerys, have you ever known me to lie to you?”
“No.”
“Well, he never did either.”
There was a moment of silence as Kira accepted the answer. Then, she laughed. “You can’t say it, can you? You can’t look me straight in the eyes and tell me that you love me.” She paused a moment to reflect. “You two are so different, Odo. Why can’t you be more like him? Am I that frightening?”
“It’s not that simple, Nerys. And it’s not that I don’t love you; I do. It’s just that it’s hard for me . . . to let people in when I’ve spent nearly fifty years trying to keep them out.”
“Odo, I just can’t wait around two hundred years for someone I can love again.”
Odo’s head spun from the stars and crystal eyes blazed with surprise and hope.
“What did you say?”
“Damn my pagh, but someone waiting two hundred years just to spend some time with me . . . I fell in love with him.”
“I’m not him, Nerys.” Odo’s face slipped back into the mask it had grown accustomed to. “I don’t think I ever could be.”
“I don’t want you to be him, Odo. I just — I just want you to be you. No pretenses, no hiding in your official role as chief of security. I want to get to know the you that enjoys shifting into different shapes and forms, especially if they annoy Quark; who likes to kayak with Miles; who has breakfast with Garak every now and then, who enjoys reading detective novels. I want to . . .” Kira stopped herself, tears forming in her eyes.
“What is it, Nerys?” He took a step forward, closer to her.
“I . . . what made her so different?”
Odo paused. “Who?”
“Arissa.”
Odo turned from both Kira and the window and walked to the large dome-like structure that dominated his quarters. He hadn’t thought about Arissa in a waking state for quite some time but the pain was still there as fresh as if she had gone from him yesterday.
“You let her in; what did she do so differently?”
“She wanted in. For the first time in my life, I was the wanted one. I guess it’s easy to make a move when all you have to really do is just stand still and not go anywhere.”
Kira swung her legs down from the sill and hopped the few centimeters to the floor. “Odo, let me in. I want to know that you, the one she got to know, the one that’s not afraid to love someone.”
“Then I’m afraid you’re out of luck, Nerys. I was afraid every moment I was with her.” He kept his gaze on the sculpture.
“Of what?” she asked compassionately.
“Of being rejected, not measuring up, being thrown aside, discarded like a piece of debris, left to float aimlessly through the galaxy for three hundred years . . . again.”
“Odo, Arissa was nothing like the Founders. She cared for you.”
“But don’t you see, Nerys? I think at one time they did, too. They just had higher priorities. It just turned out that I was more expendable than I had originally thought.”
“Odo, you are not expendable! You are my friend and a damn good one! And they were fools for abandoning you like that.” Kira closed the distance between them. “Odo, listen to me. You can’t spend your whole life second-guessing fate. Everything that’s happened has been for a reason . . .”
“Even the change in the autopilot’s course?” he asked complacently. It made Kira pause.
“I — I’m not sure.”
“Nerys, it sounds like I’m not the only one who needs convincing.” He reached up and brushed her cheek with a trembling hand. “I understand that it must be difficult for you to accept, Nerys. It hasn’t exactly been a picnic for me either. Maybe . . . maybe it’s time you went and asked the Prophets for advice again. Who knows, they may be just as confused as you are.”
“I don’t know, Odo,” she said, tracing a line along the sculpture as she circled it. “I mean, I have a great respect and devotion for the Prophets; they know what’s best, but I also can’t help thinking that I should be choosing my own path this time.”
“Because of Shakaar.” Odo paused. “You . . . you still miss him, don’t you.”
“Yes.” The answer was soft as memories flashed through Kira’s head. “He was such a good friend, Odo, one of the few left from the Resistance. When we got involved, I thought nothing could work out better. I guess I was wrong.” There was a pause of regret. “I just — I just don’t want to make the same mistake with you. There’s so many things I still haven’t sorted out.”
“Nerys,” he said as he stepped closer, stopping her path around the giant sculpture. “You know how I said that the other Odo linked with me before he left.” Kira nodded slightly. “I know — I remember everything he went through, two hundred years of pain and suffering. At first he refused to accept the fact that you were going to die. He spent every hour of the day for three days figuring out how to counteract the quantum interference. On a few occasions you and he joked about your fate as if Julian would still find some miracle cure but, then, as your neural tissue started to deteriorate, there was no more denying it. He stayed by your side for the entire week before you . . . before you died. He needed to be there, but it was so painful. You didn’t know who anyone was anymore, you couldn’t take care of yourself; Julian eventually had you confined to a small room in the compound, but even then he was with you.
“By the time the funeral came around, he was another person. He never told you how he felt; he had to wait two hundred years to do that. It was a depressing day; thunderstorms, lightning, thunder, but still they went on with the service. He made them; he couldn’t bear it a minute longer. Dax tried to help but as soon as the Captain concluded, he flew off into the storms, a long hollow screech echoing on the wind. He flew for days on end, across the planet, hoping one of the quantum distortions would reach down and pluck him from the sky, that the Prophets would take mercy on him. But they didn’t. When he finally returned — it must have been a good week and he never stopped to regenerate — his mind was already starting to go. The endurance and strain holding shape had put on him was enormous but it was almost as if he couldn’t shift back, couldn’t let himself be himself again without you.
“By the time he reached your grave, he lost all cohesion and just spread out over you, almost as if it would be a blanket warm enough to wake you from your cold sleep. Who knows how long he would have stayed there, but Dax was by a few days later to visit the grave and she found him. She was so relieved to see him again; nobody had known whether he would come back or not, whether he had even survived the storm. She finally coaxed him back to the village, and for awhile he was able to pretend everything was all right. But then, people started pairing off, and as soon as Dax and Worf were engaged, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He fled to the outskirts of the village, built himself a little room the size of one of the crew quarters onboard the Defiant. People visited, of course; he always suspected Sisko had something to do with that but they never stayed long. They couldn’t bear the sorrow his home contained, except Dax. She was by every other day without fail, and she did manage to lure him back to the village’s heart for the wedding.
“After that, he didn’t do much really: practiced shapeshifting, promoted the legend that was starting to be weaved around his situation with the children that were starting to be born. But always it was a very solitary way of living. Dax, ever the persistent one, kept trying to snap him out of it, bring him back to reality, but all too soon she was consumed with caring for her children and she just didn’t have the time. Besides, it was hard on her; every time she saw him, it reminded her of you and she had her own load of guilt.” Odo paused and sighed. “So, you see, Nerys, you’re not the only one with things to sort out. I’m dealing with twenty-five times the usual dose of misery.”
“You don’t think I’m not dealing with misery?” she choked out, trying to hold back inexplicable tears. “I’m not just talking about the population of Gaia, the civilization,” she countered before Odo could even protest. “I’m talking about you — or him. I’m the reason they’re all gone. I’m the reason that no matter what timeline it was in, I hurt you. I’m the one that killed all those people. I’m the one that killed you.” The tears had overcome her now as her pagh rang truly in the otherwise silent room. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Odo. I didn’t want to lose you — I still don’t.” Her voice was quiet as she took a step closer to him, but she couldn’t look him the eyes, not yet.
He embraced her gently, hesitantly, long sinewy arms encircling her a bit awkwardly.
“I love you, Nerys. I always have and I always will.”
“Enough to sacrifice eight thousand lives?” she asked, a tremble in her voice. Would it be a sign of loyalty, insanity, maniacal abandon? How would that affect her and the decisions she made about him from here on in? She felt him take a deep breath.
“I don’t know, Nerys. All I know is that I love you more than I thought was possible, and I didn’t realize until I had come close to truly losing you, to knowing what I would be like if I ever did lose you. Besides that, I can only promise you that I will never lie to you.” He leaned back away from her slightly to get a look at her face. After a few moments, brown eyes met blue ones.
There were so many questions she had, so many answers she needed to find, but from what Odo had told her, there were so many yet unanswered when she had died — could she risk that again? The Prophets had sent her along a different path after all, hastily assembled after Odo’s “change of plans,” no doubt. Perhaps it was not supposed to have ended back on Gaia . . . at least, not yet. Her new path was here.
But where would it lead her?
Where would it lead them?
(-|-)