Chapter Text
The world was on fire and
no one could save me but you
'Wicked Game'
Chris Isaak
Kira smashed the vanity mirror because they’d finally done it, they’d convinced her she wasn’t herself.
They: the slithery Entek with that corpse and the hara cat memory, the years-ago Iliana with her clear-eyed zeal and recorded message, the vigilant Legate with his food and his stories.
And the mirror too. Her face. Whosever it was. Whose—
Hers…
No! No! No! The face was Cardassian and—
But she was Cardassian, they’d turned her. They’d done it, they’d broken h—
No! I’m Kira Nerys! I do the breaking! I break Cardassians!
i do the breaking
i break
i’m broken
Kira smashed the mirror and wilted because they’d cut her through the stem, clean through the knees where a flower draws its water and life and she was dying, a severed stalk, doomed, unfit—a weed, they’d made her a weed who couldn’t stand, they would pull her and she’d wither, whoever she was, whoever she—
already dead
wasn’t Kira
never Nerys
And Kira kissed the Legate because—
◦ ❀ ◦
“Iliana!”
A beautiful name, thought Kira, registering how he made it sound like a reprimand. She’d carried her childishness to the extreme, hammering the glass into pieces—this was histrionics, too much, inordinate. He would shake it from her, he was pulling her off the wreckage. A firm grip on her shoulders, like she was being stubborn. “As bad as your mother,” he’d told her already.
Still, it was good that he had her: her vision was going black from crying and so was the floor beneath her feet. Couldn’t feel it anymore. She was dropping through a void, falling without mass, floating, fading—then finally crumpling to rest in his custody, on her knees, against his leg.
So this was how it felt to lay a cheek on black-clad Cardassian thigh. It was something she’d never thought to wonder about. Only kill them, if she got so obscenely close, before they did the same to her, or worse.
But the Legate was doing his worst now, holding her close and secure, and it wasn’t so bad to end this way, not on him, with his quiet solidity at her back. He was speaking words, rubbing her shoulder, letting her cry and cry as she started rocking in pursuit of oblivion on his steady muscle, which soothed her.
A Cardassian. He was as “good” as she’d accused him yesterday, as “really good,” though she hadn’t believed a word of it then.
Now she believed, and it wasn’t so painful as she’d feared. Here, Kira could swallow her end in peace, here in this one Cardassian’s possession, in his good and honest hold. She hugged his knee, nuzzling his strong and gentle warmth.
Never imagined this. Never dreamed it, and then her ears caught up to his words, the ones he’d spoken last, and he couldn’t have—he couldn’t have said that.
“I’ve been selfish… I can’t keep you here, no matter how much I want to. Entek will never rest until he’s broken you.”
Kira kept rocking her cheek on his thigh, eyes fixed on Iliana’s bedroom lamp, watching her tears smear the clustered glass flowers into a single-shaped fuzziness of pale and bloodless pink.
The flowers looked out of place in this room, same as she, floating masslessly on cut stems of their own, enfooted in a metal base atop a stony table by an unyielding armchair. In here, they didn’t fit. Their curving asymmetry was unplanned, undesigned—they had spirit, at odds with the angular decor.
Had spirit, but they’d been stolen. Taken from their home, from fields where they’d long ago waved about in sunny breezes with their non-angular kin—plucked, like she’d been, consigned to huddle for warmth in this spiritless alien bedroom, their breath and color as frozen as that corpse, their translucent petals cryogenically preserved.
“We have to get you away from Cardassia.”
No, he couldn’t mean that. Didn’t he know? She was cut! Couldn’t wave in those fields again—Kira was dead, unbreathing! Entek had her body, her once-spirited body, pale and bloodless, long preserved.
Unless…
“You would do that?” she asked him, knowing he would because she’d heard him say it just now.
“For me?” she added, and here was the question: who was she to the Legate—to this one Cardassian?
She’d been ready to be buried right here on his leg, to feed the soil in this black-clad bed, in this man’s arms. Yet having finally begun to settle in him, now she was falling again, floating without form, fading.
Who was she? If not Kira, he would rip her off Cardassia to rootless oblivion. But if herself, he’d fly her home to her waving fields.
“Why?” she whispered, petrified to hear.
He cradled her more securely, cupping her elbow and stroking her hair at the crown, first hesitantly, then with more expressive weight as he settled his cheek there together with his hand.
And he cut her again, at the knees.
“You’re my daughter, Iliana. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Even if it means losing you again.”
◦ ❀ ◦
It wasn’t strategized. Wasn’t mapped, wasn’t scratched in the dirt with a phaser pistol—first we neutralize these soldiers, then Tahna takes the power relay while Nerys seduces this unsuspecting guard.
It wasn’t a stealth attack or impromptu assault. Wasn’t any kind of resistance maneuver.
Was just: running for her life in the night, heading for the scent-masking water, alert to brutal noises in the dark—crunchy leaves, ragged panting, pursuers’ footfalls, grunting hounds.
Was just: Kira, just heedless, just desperate to stay alive. One move after another, was her reigning impulse: move forward, then further, now go!
Without a conscious plan, she twisted up and threw herself over the Legate’s neck, pushing herself into his half-kneeling embrace in a way that a daughter never would—and instantly, it became an over-intimate front-pressing of bodies, a boundary-crushing union charged with irreversible intent, with knowing and wanting to know.
Their loaded carnality startled Kira and she drew back to get a measure of control, noting her nearness to the twin ridges joining his ear to his jaw. Familiarly alien to her: Cardassian. At this close range, she could run her fingers down those tracks and slit his throat beneath the chin.
But instead she caressed him there, running light and undeadly hands across his windpipe, watching a bruise-like blueness follow her fingers along his scales before she instinctively lowered her lips to one of them and brushed it. Startled again, she halted on the spot.
So this was how it felt to lay a mouth on gray-cool Cardassian neck, something she’d never dreamed to think about.
His skin was more heated than she expected, more pliant than it looked. She shut her eyes and opened her nostrils, drawing his softspice scent into the night behind her lids, listening to the hiss of her inhalation, and in the dark she heard an answering noise, subtle but primal, a sigh of alien origin which undeniably called her to find his lips and brush those too.
Kira kissed the Legate because his daughter never would, and it felt like one move after another, and it felt like staying alive.
