FIC: Substantial (Deep Space Nine, Kira, PG)
Title: Substantial
Fandom: Deep Space Nine
Characters: Kira, Odo
Rating: PG
Summary: Kira floats between sky and sea.
Disclaimer: Paramount owns this universe.
Notes: Written for the picfor1000 Four Seasons challenge. My assigned picture is beneath the link with the story.




She has drifted so far out that the shoreline is a blur and the illusion of land is just that. Kira is not certain where the ground ends and the Great Link begins; on this planet, solid and fluid shift and merge. Like Bajoran emotions.

She is fairly certain that the place where she set down her shuttle is firm, that it will still be there when she returns and will not vanish into the inchoate mass. The Great Link has grown and swelled since she last visited. Kira thinks the Founders must be reproducing, though she is not certain how that works... whether it is done by individuals or some kind of group consensus, whether children have two parents or many.

The tree-shapes past the clearing resemble monsters showing off their muscles, reaching to tear down the sky. They succeeded once, but those monsters are not here now. Are they dead, or were they reabsorbed somehow into the Link, their aggressive fury redirected? Nobody would speak about it in front of her, not even Odo. Whom she is ostensibly here to visit. Who could be anywhere right now in this golden ocean, touching her, reading her thoughts... she does not know.

Kira is supposed to be on vacation. She is supposed to be living a normal life. It's someone else's turn to be the heroine; Dax is in command of the station in her absence and Kasidy is speaking in her place at a symposium on Bajor. Only when Julian convinced her to take a few days and get away, she realized that she had nowhere to go. Risa doesn't interest her, Betazed is still in the process of rebuilding. She can't imagine going to Earth without Benjamin, though the O'Briens would welcome her and it wouldn't be difficult to find a traveling companion if she wanted one -- Jake would have gone with her, or possibly even Tom Riker, now that he is free.

She has a standing invitation to visit Garak. It isn't the thought of being on Cardassia that keeps her away -- not for the reasons it would have, once, and not even because she's something of a celebrity there. It's that on Cardassia, she won't be able to escape thinking of Damar, and that wound is still much too raw. She'd been ready, somehow, for Sisko to lay down his life in the struggle, and she'd prepared herself to lose Odo during all those weeks he suffered from the Founders' disease -- the disease made by the Federation. The last time she arrived to see this great sea of shapeshifters, it had been discolored, dying. Sending Odo to cure his people had not ripped at her the way it had to watch Damar fall, realizing only as she rallied his troops that during those last days what they had become to one another.

She could step into the pool of Founders -- with Odo part of the Great Link now, she thinks they would welcome her -- yet she cannot bring herself to do so. Not having arrived uninvited, uncertain whether the man (man?) she once loved still thinks of himself as an individual or a component of something greater than himself. When no one rose from the pool of changelings to greet her, she took an inflatable from the shuttle and propelled herself out into the sea that is the Great Link, where she floats above and outside, holding her body free from any contact.

What is she afraid of? That she will be pulled in to drown? Is she more afraid that she could be brought into the Link, her personality absorbed, unable ever to break free? Kira has always been fiercely Bajoran, but she has also always been fiercely individual; neither Vedeks nor ministers could sway her from a path she saw as the right one. From the very first time he linked with one of his own people, Odo was different, and even after Kira fell in love with him, she understood that that difference would always be with him... a more complicated problem than the puzzle of their different anatomies which required them both to learn strange ways of making love.

Since she loved Odo, thinks Kira, she could have loved Damar, despite his Cardassian face and body. Despite the fact that it was his hand on the weapon that killed Ziyal. It is absurd to think of terms like enemy now. Odo was her enemy too, a part of a species that might have represented a greater threat to Bajor.

Why, then, does it continue to feel so abstract? Her loathing of Dukat was never intangible. Perhaps because he had such a distinctive voice, the smirk in memory taunting her across the years (he took my mother from me twice), she can never forgive him, whereas the female Founder now in a Starfleet prison is only a figure of pity. The female changeling was once Odo's lover, Kira knows; they not only joined in the way of his people but of Kira's own, before it had occurred to think of Odo as a lover rather than a friend, though she knows now that she suspected long before he let a planet die for her that his feelings for her went beyond comradeship.

In making that decision, Odo may have saved the galaxy, for none of them would have been home to fight the Dominion, and (more importantly to Kira) the Emissary would not have stopped the Pah-wraiths. And yet Odo had left; after refusing to accept Kira's death so that her comrades might have a life they chose, Odo chose to return here.

Perhaps she has only to dip a hand in to find him; perhaps he already knows of her presence, but is too deeply immersed in the Link, or perhaps he does not remember being himself at all. In this place of light, Kira is not certain that she would remember.

And that, she knows, is why Odo let her go.