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witticasterEach night after leaving the bridge, and each morning before returning, Kira Nerys sat at the small table in her room and stared at her padd. With a cup of raktajino at her side, she read case file after case file, gazing at names and faces with the barest hint of a frown furrowing her brow. She wasn't entirely sure what it was she was looking for, what the right mix of history and facial expression might be, but she hoped she would know it when she saw it.
Choosing children to adopt was harder than she'd ever imagined it would be.
Two, she had decided, would be best. Her own childhood would have been rather lonelier, if not for her brothers, and she didn't want to deprive another child of the opportunity to have a sibling. But which two? There were thousands of children on Bajor without family to care for them, even now--a decade past the end of the occupation, three years since the end of the Dominion War. The Bajoran War Orphans Fund still needed all the help it could get, and Kira was determined to see that she did her part to the fullest extent possible.
All duty aside, the quiet yearning for a child she might call her own--a desire she would have scoffed at just a few years ago--had taken root in her. She heard from the O'Briens every few months, Keiko always with a story to tell of some new discovery Yoshi had made about the world, and each time, Kira felt herself thrum with a pang of envy. To watch a child learn new things, to teach him everything he needed to know, had begun to seem like a gift from the Prophets.
She had already ruled out the Cardassian orphans, as well as those who counted a Bajoran and a Cardassian each as parents. Whenever she thought too long on it, she remembered Ziyal's delicate grey features and felt her chest clench--but the memory of Ziyal kept her from expanding her search. Her death was one sliver of regret among many Kira had come to carry in her heart, but it was sharp enough that she wanted to look elsewhere for a child.
Even after she'd narrowed the field to Bajoran orphans of five or more years of age--the tougher children to place with new families--she had the files of hundreds of children at her fingertips. A low-quality picture of each child accompanied his or her name, age, home province, and known history. And each seemed more deserving of a loving home than the last.
Kar Sona had lost her mother, father, and elder brother to exhaustion in a labor camp. Tiran Anaru was raised by his mother until she was found by the Cardassians leading an improvised temple service. After his extended family was murdered by Cardassians, Permin Ri's father was killed in a construction accident, and his mother died of fever. Many of the children were born in the twilight of the occupation; the oldest ones likely had faint memories of what Bajor was under Cardassian rule. The youngest had lost their parents to drought, to sickness and famine, or to the war with the Dominion. Some smiled in their pictures, while others stared straight ahead with hardened eyes.
Kira began to wonder if she couldn't give over a section of the habitat ring to a few dozen children. Deep Space 9 contained nothing close to the thousands of residents and prisoners it had teemed with in its Terok Nor days, after all--but she would simply be making them trade one orphanage for another. She was concerned for her ability to devote time to two children while commanding the station; however much she longed to take them all in, it was an inconceivable fantasy.
A week into her search, she'd flagged two dozen children as strong possibilities and still had at least five hundred to go through. She pored through one after another on the morning of her day off, promising herself that she'd go out for a walk on the promenade in an hour. If she didn't get up for a break soon, she was going to feel like a tightly coiled spring soon, energy waiting to explode outwards.
"One more file" became two more, then three, then four. After reading how Las Tomin had been abandoned as a toddler on the doorstep of an orphanage in Tozhat Province three years ago, she set down her padd, stretching her neck and her shoulders. It was high time to get up and take a look at the land of the living.
Well, she thought, glancing back down at the curly head of a six-year-old smiling beatifically into space. Maybe I could look at one more.
Kira paged to the next child and glanced over her vitals, barely noticing her picture. Tola Deryn, nine years old, was found wandering alone at the edge of Jalanda City when she was five. She hadn't been able to provide further information about the whereabouts of her family at the time and had yet to be claimed as kin to anyone. The family name "Tola" had been assigned to her arbitrarily.
Deryn wasn't the first child to arrive at an orphanage knowing her given name and little else. Kira didn't doubt that most of the youngest children had been named essentially at random. Still, her particular case was intriguing. Upon her arrival at the orphanage some years ago, she'd claimed no knowledge whatsoever of where she had lived previously; she couldn't even remember what she'd been doing the day before. Kira tapped the girl's picture, enlarging it until it filled the padd screen.
Deryn's dark eyes stared back at her defiantly, every detail of her face suddenly clear: her heavy brow and wrinkled nose, the tell-tale thick neck and forehead ridge. Kira felt something within her twisting as she looked at the way the girl's dark hair hung around her face in lank strands.
She looks like me, Kira thought, then frowned at the padd. She looks like Ziyal, but she really looks like me. It was her first thought, an entirely unbidden intrusion from her subconscious mind, but she couldn't deny the truth in it.
She and Deryn shared nothing in the way of physical resemblance, but Kira didn't have any trouble imagining a portrait of herself near the same age. Skinny, red hair that could use washing, and a jaundiced eye for all but her family and closest friends. Three years away from convincing the nearest resistance cell that she wasn't too small to fire a weapon, nor too squeamish to see what happened when she aimed well. There were no wars left for Deryn to fight--and may it stay that way--but she looked prepared to go into battle, should the need arise.
There but for the Prophets' kindness.
The clerk who put together her file must have mistakenly listed both her parents, whoever they were, as Bajoran. Maybe it was a fluke--or maybe it was a sign. After all, the Prophets didn't always use words to point people in the right direction. She'd decided she didn't want to take in a half-Cardassian child, had purposely narrowed her search to full-blooded Bajorans who might have trouble finding homes, and yet here Deryn was. Here, with a familiar, indignant loneliness hiding in her stare, daring Kira to consider passing her over.
"I guess the Prophets have more faith in me than I did," Kira told the image and managed a wry half-smile. She tapped the padd once more, drawing up the girl's location. The Jalanda City Resettlement Center. She'd send them a message that evening.
-
"Didn't see you come in, Colonel," said Quark, and, considering the half-dozen people she'd watched him pour drinks for since she sat down, Kira believed him. It looked like she'd arrived smack in the middle of rush hour. He sidled up to her, a glass in one hand and a bar mop in the other. "What'll you have?"
"How about a Bajoran ale?" She propped her chin on one hand as he walked over to the tap, still within earshot. "Looks like you're making good business tonight."
"Oh, I'm holding a darts tournament tomorrow night. This is their last chance to get some practice in."
"A darts tournament? You might as well award first prize to Doctor Bashir right now, you know."
Quark grinned as he set a full glass of Bajoran ale on the bar in front of her. "Oh, no, Colonel, he's going to be the referee. Wants to give everyone a 'sporting chance.'"
"So what's the prize?" she asked, taking a swig of the ale. The taste was light on her tongue, a bright fizz with a lingering taste of spice. Just what she needed after a day's work.
"Five free sessions in the holosuites."
"And Julian challenging the winner to games for the next six months." She'd played darts with him once, soon after Miles left, but she wasn't much better at it than she was baseball. It didn't long for both of them to realize that they'd be better off playing the occasional game of springball. "Sounds like fun."
Quark turned his attention to a group who'd come in for a round of black holes then, just long enough to call a waiter over to mix up the drinks, before walking back over to Kira.
"It's too bad you're going to miss it," he continued, wiping down the bar with his towel with a consciously casual air--there wasn't a single spill to clean up, as far as Kira could tell. "How long're you on Bajor?"
"Five weeks." It felt like a looming stretch of time every time she said it aloud, even now that she'd had a week's notice. Kira couldn't remember the last time she'd been spent more than two weeks on the ground. The thought that she'd be on Bajor for twice that long and then some was thrilling even as she wondered whether she wouldn't grow restless within a week's time.
"Five weeks?" Quark must not have picked up that bit of gossip before that moment, judging by the way his brow shot up. "What're they going to do, lock you up with the orphans and see who makes it out alive?"
Kira rolled her eyes as she took another sip of her drink. "If you want to adopt a Bajoran child, you have to visit the orphanage five weeks in a row, so they can see how you'll get along with the kid. If you make it that long without tearing your hair out, a vedek performs the adoption ceremony, and that's that."
"You Bajorans have a ceremony for everything, don't you." There wasn't any bite to the comment, though. Even a casual observer might notice the slight upward tilt at the corners of his mouth. "You'd think it'd be easier just to--"
Kira never found out how Quark would improve the Bajoran adoption system. From behind her came Julian's voice. "Hello Quark, hello Colonel. D'you have our holosuite program?"
"Didn't anyone ever teach you not to interrupt?" It was Quark's turn to roll his eyes before going to look for the program in question.
Kira turned around to get a good look at them: Julian in a black tuxedo, Ezri wearing an emerald green dress with a hem that skimmed the floor. "Where're you two going tonight?"
"London," Ezri answered with a bright smile.
"There's nowhere finer in the galaxy. Ah, thank you, Quark." Taking the holosuite program, Julian slipped an arm around Ezri's shoulders. "Have a good night."
"You, too," Kira said. She watched them head off toward the stairs; it was hard not to be impressed by the way Julian managed not to run into anything, despite the fact that he never seemed to look away from Ezri.
"She's going to marry him one of these days," she heard Quark say in an low voice. He was still watching them make their way to the holosuite when Kira swiveled back toward the bar. After a moment, he looked away, back to Kira, and nodded toward her drink. "You going to want another one of those?"
She glanced down at her drink, still half full. If Quark wanted to play the 'If anyone asks, I didn't say anything' game, she could play along with him. "I think I'll stick with one. Tomorrow's a big day."
"Yeah, I guess so." He gave her a crooked, toothy smile. "Good luck with that. Pick a kid that's well-behaved."
Choosing children to adopt was harder than she'd ever imagined it would be.
Two, she had decided, would be best. Her own childhood would have been rather lonelier, if not for her brothers, and she didn't want to deprive another child of the opportunity to have a sibling. But which two? There were thousands of children on Bajor without family to care for them, even now--a decade past the end of the occupation, three years since the end of the Dominion War. The Bajoran War Orphans Fund still needed all the help it could get, and Kira was determined to see that she did her part to the fullest extent possible.
All duty aside, the quiet yearning for a child she might call her own--a desire she would have scoffed at just a few years ago--had taken root in her. She heard from the O'Briens every few months, Keiko always with a story to tell of some new discovery Yoshi had made about the world, and each time, Kira felt herself thrum with a pang of envy. To watch a child learn new things, to teach him everything he needed to know, had begun to seem like a gift from the Prophets.
She had already ruled out the Cardassian orphans, as well as those who counted a Bajoran and a Cardassian each as parents. Whenever she thought too long on it, she remembered Ziyal's delicate grey features and felt her chest clench--but the memory of Ziyal kept her from expanding her search. Her death was one sliver of regret among many Kira had come to carry in her heart, but it was sharp enough that she wanted to look elsewhere for a child.
Even after she'd narrowed the field to Bajoran orphans of five or more years of age--the tougher children to place with new families--she had the files of hundreds of children at her fingertips. A low-quality picture of each child accompanied his or her name, age, home province, and known history. And each seemed more deserving of a loving home than the last.
Kar Sona had lost her mother, father, and elder brother to exhaustion in a labor camp. Tiran Anaru was raised by his mother until she was found by the Cardassians leading an improvised temple service. After his extended family was murdered by Cardassians, Permin Ri's father was killed in a construction accident, and his mother died of fever. Many of the children were born in the twilight of the occupation; the oldest ones likely had faint memories of what Bajor was under Cardassian rule. The youngest had lost their parents to drought, to sickness and famine, or to the war with the Dominion. Some smiled in their pictures, while others stared straight ahead with hardened eyes.
Kira began to wonder if she couldn't give over a section of the habitat ring to a few dozen children. Deep Space 9 contained nothing close to the thousands of residents and prisoners it had teemed with in its Terok Nor days, after all--but she would simply be making them trade one orphanage for another. She was concerned for her ability to devote time to two children while commanding the station; however much she longed to take them all in, it was an inconceivable fantasy.
A week into her search, she'd flagged two dozen children as strong possibilities and still had at least five hundred to go through. She pored through one after another on the morning of her day off, promising herself that she'd go out for a walk on the promenade in an hour. If she didn't get up for a break soon, she was going to feel like a tightly coiled spring soon, energy waiting to explode outwards.
"One more file" became two more, then three, then four. After reading how Las Tomin had been abandoned as a toddler on the doorstep of an orphanage in Tozhat Province three years ago, she set down her padd, stretching her neck and her shoulders. It was high time to get up and take a look at the land of the living.
Well, she thought, glancing back down at the curly head of a six-year-old smiling beatifically into space. Maybe I could look at one more.
Kira paged to the next child and glanced over her vitals, barely noticing her picture. Tola Deryn, nine years old, was found wandering alone at the edge of Jalanda City when she was five. She hadn't been able to provide further information about the whereabouts of her family at the time and had yet to be claimed as kin to anyone. The family name "Tola" had been assigned to her arbitrarily.
Deryn wasn't the first child to arrive at an orphanage knowing her given name and little else. Kira didn't doubt that most of the youngest children had been named essentially at random. Still, her particular case was intriguing. Upon her arrival at the orphanage some years ago, she'd claimed no knowledge whatsoever of where she had lived previously; she couldn't even remember what she'd been doing the day before. Kira tapped the girl's picture, enlarging it until it filled the padd screen.
Deryn's dark eyes stared back at her defiantly, every detail of her face suddenly clear: her heavy brow and wrinkled nose, the tell-tale thick neck and forehead ridge. Kira felt something within her twisting as she looked at the way the girl's dark hair hung around her face in lank strands.
She looks like me, Kira thought, then frowned at the padd. She looks like Ziyal, but she really looks like me. It was her first thought, an entirely unbidden intrusion from her subconscious mind, but she couldn't deny the truth in it.
She and Deryn shared nothing in the way of physical resemblance, but Kira didn't have any trouble imagining a portrait of herself near the same age. Skinny, red hair that could use washing, and a jaundiced eye for all but her family and closest friends. Three years away from convincing the nearest resistance cell that she wasn't too small to fire a weapon, nor too squeamish to see what happened when she aimed well. There were no wars left for Deryn to fight--and may it stay that way--but she looked prepared to go into battle, should the need arise.
There but for the Prophets' kindness.
The clerk who put together her file must have mistakenly listed both her parents, whoever they were, as Bajoran. Maybe it was a fluke--or maybe it was a sign. After all, the Prophets didn't always use words to point people in the right direction. She'd decided she didn't want to take in a half-Cardassian child, had purposely narrowed her search to full-blooded Bajorans who might have trouble finding homes, and yet here Deryn was. Here, with a familiar, indignant loneliness hiding in her stare, daring Kira to consider passing her over.
"I guess the Prophets have more faith in me than I did," Kira told the image and managed a wry half-smile. She tapped the padd once more, drawing up the girl's location. The Jalanda City Resettlement Center. She'd send them a message that evening.
-
"Didn't see you come in, Colonel," said Quark, and, considering the half-dozen people she'd watched him pour drinks for since she sat down, Kira believed him. It looked like she'd arrived smack in the middle of rush hour. He sidled up to her, a glass in one hand and a bar mop in the other. "What'll you have?"
"How about a Bajoran ale?" She propped her chin on one hand as he walked over to the tap, still within earshot. "Looks like you're making good business tonight."
"Oh, I'm holding a darts tournament tomorrow night. This is their last chance to get some practice in."
"A darts tournament? You might as well award first prize to Doctor Bashir right now, you know."
Quark grinned as he set a full glass of Bajoran ale on the bar in front of her. "Oh, no, Colonel, he's going to be the referee. Wants to give everyone a 'sporting chance.'"
"So what's the prize?" she asked, taking a swig of the ale. The taste was light on her tongue, a bright fizz with a lingering taste of spice. Just what she needed after a day's work.
"Five free sessions in the holosuites."
"And Julian challenging the winner to games for the next six months." She'd played darts with him once, soon after Miles left, but she wasn't much better at it than she was baseball. It didn't long for both of them to realize that they'd be better off playing the occasional game of springball. "Sounds like fun."
Quark turned his attention to a group who'd come in for a round of black holes then, just long enough to call a waiter over to mix up the drinks, before walking back over to Kira.
"It's too bad you're going to miss it," he continued, wiping down the bar with his towel with a consciously casual air--there wasn't a single spill to clean up, as far as Kira could tell. "How long're you on Bajor?"
"Five weeks." It felt like a looming stretch of time every time she said it aloud, even now that she'd had a week's notice. Kira couldn't remember the last time she'd been spent more than two weeks on the ground. The thought that she'd be on Bajor for twice that long and then some was thrilling even as she wondered whether she wouldn't grow restless within a week's time.
"Five weeks?" Quark must not have picked up that bit of gossip before that moment, judging by the way his brow shot up. "What're they going to do, lock you up with the orphans and see who makes it out alive?"
Kira rolled her eyes as she took another sip of her drink. "If you want to adopt a Bajoran child, you have to visit the orphanage five weeks in a row, so they can see how you'll get along with the kid. If you make it that long without tearing your hair out, a vedek performs the adoption ceremony, and that's that."
"You Bajorans have a ceremony for everything, don't you." There wasn't any bite to the comment, though. Even a casual observer might notice the slight upward tilt at the corners of his mouth. "You'd think it'd be easier just to--"
Kira never found out how Quark would improve the Bajoran adoption system. From behind her came Julian's voice. "Hello Quark, hello Colonel. D'you have our holosuite program?"
"Didn't anyone ever teach you not to interrupt?" It was Quark's turn to roll his eyes before going to look for the program in question.
Kira turned around to get a good look at them: Julian in a black tuxedo, Ezri wearing an emerald green dress with a hem that skimmed the floor. "Where're you two going tonight?"
"London," Ezri answered with a bright smile.
"There's nowhere finer in the galaxy. Ah, thank you, Quark." Taking the holosuite program, Julian slipped an arm around Ezri's shoulders. "Have a good night."
"You, too," Kira said. She watched them head off toward the stairs; it was hard not to be impressed by the way Julian managed not to run into anything, despite the fact that he never seemed to look away from Ezri.
"She's going to marry him one of these days," she heard Quark say in an low voice. He was still watching them make their way to the holosuite when Kira swiveled back toward the bar. After a moment, he looked away, back to Kira, and nodded toward her drink. "You going to want another one of those?"
She glanced down at her drink, still half full. If Quark wanted to play the 'If anyone asks, I didn't say anything' game, she could play along with him. "I think I'll stick with one. Tomorrow's a big day."
"Yeah, I guess so." He gave her a crooked, toothy smile. "Good luck with that. Pick a kid that's well-behaved."
